you know what's completely absent from the sub-genre of

[james_davis_nicoll]

women who gave up careers in the big city to move to a small town, run a small business, find a new romance, adopt or foster a couple of kids and solve crime? Women who decide/discover at age 40 that yeah, they really do prefer to be romantically involved with women over men.

Why is that?

[They exist, I just don't get sent them for some reason. Time to go button hole my editors on this matter]

Comments

[eagle]

I am now completely conditioned to treat stuff you add in brackets as text added years later, which caused a certain amount of cognitive dissonance while parsing this entry.

Slightly off topic

[celestialweasel.livejournal.com]

Am I right in believing (or did I dream it) that there are imprints of detective novels that are essentially sold only to libraries who want crime novels by the yard?

[srogerscat.livejournal.com]

Because stories about forty year old lesbian protagonists are not as arousing to young straight men as tales of twenty year old lipstick lesbians?

[the-siobhan.livejournal.com]

I've read a few but they are marketed strictly to lesbians. So you will probably only find them in bookstores like Glad Day.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Because you aren't looking for them from the lesbian book distributors? I'm not sure from your laundry list whether "solve crime" is an essential element or optional, but using that as a filtering mechanism you might try browsing through the mystery/suspense/intrigue category at Bella Books (which distributes for a wide variety of lesbian-focused/inclusive publishers as well as distributing their own publications. (Full disclosure: my own first novel is coming out from Bella in January.)

I confess that my own genre tastes don't run to contemporary mysteries so I can't come up with titles off the top of my head, but I find it extremely unlikely that there aren't at least a dozen professionally published books out there fitting your criteria -- and even more self-published, of course.

[michael a. davis (from livejournal.com)]

I would guess that historically (though less so contemporarily), said detective would be moving in the opposite direction.

[ravenskyewalker.livejournal.com]

Back in the 1990s, I was aware of (and read) loads of lesbian detective novels. As a poster notes, Mary Wings was one, but there were others (but ask me to name them, and I probably no longer can, alas). I know at least one of the former lesbian-leaning book publishers has since gone out of business, but find it difficult to believe that there aren't enough self-published books to make up for some of that loss. (My life went chaotic enough back in 1999 that I lost track of certain things; regrettably, that was one.)

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

I am at a severe disadvantage, momentarily, due to recent eye surgery, but I have some answers for your question. I read a lot of lesbian books in the 80s that covered those situations.

J. M. Redman wrote the Mickey Knight series; Ellen Hart went from lesbian publisher to a mainstream house, and still publishes although I have lost track of her books. More once I'm upright for a greater percentage of time...