Report for Murder

Fiction. Gay and Lesbian Studies. Lindsay Gordon, self-proclaimed cynical socialist lesbian feminist journalist is less than overjoyed at the prospect of spending a weekend at a posh girls' boarding school. Tensions are running high over the school's financial problems; the fact that school alumna and reknowned musician Lorna Smith-Couper, will return to the school to perform at a benefit concert only exacerbates anxieties. When Smith-Couper is found strangled with her own cello string right before the concert, Lindsay and Cordelia find their new relationship tested in unique ways as they seek to find the murderer among a long list of suspects. ...a clever mystery, a good read, and a heroine who is my kind of woman: Lindsay Gordon is smart, tenacious, daring, lusty, loyal, and class-conscious to the bone --Barbara Neely, author of the Blanche White series.

The first US publication of a novel that appeared in 1987 in England. Here, gay journalist Lindsay Gordon (Deadline for Murder, 1997, etc.), based in Glasgow and presently freelancing to eke out a living, makes her debut when longtime friend Paddy Callaghan, a drama teacher at the Derbyshire House Girls' School, gets her a magazine assignment for a story on the school's fund-raising weekendan event that's part of the schools battle to fend off builder James Cartwright, who wants to buy its athletic fields for residential development. Other weekend guests include novelist/talk-show star Cordelia Brown and famed cellist Lorna Smith-Coupey. As the audience awaits a benefit concert that evening, Lorna is discovered dead-garrotted by a cello stringin one of the backstage music rooms. In short order, a truculent Inspector Dart has jailed Paddy for the killing, and school head Pamela Overton has authorized Lindsay and Cordelia (lovers at first sight) to try to find evidence to clear Paddy. A string of tedious interviews, plus repetitive reviews of time frames and alibis, produces a host of Lorna-hating suspects, but it's a second death that pushes our journalist-sleuth to a violent confrontation with the not-so-surprising killer. Clumsy plotting, relentlessly verbose characters, and a sluggish pace don't help Lindsay's overextended debut outingone of the author's lesser efforts. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.