The Mimi Patterson/Gianna Maglione Mysteries Series

Someone is murdering wealthy, married, and deeply closeted gay people in Washington, DC--four so far, brutally and always in a dark parking lot. Police lieutenant Gianna Maglione is head of the Hate Crimes Unit and it's her job to find the perp. Except that after four murders, she and her team don't have a single clue and the only thing they know for sure is that there will be another murder. Making Gianna's life even more difficult is investigative newspaper reporter Mimi Patterson who, despite Gianna's best efforts, also is investigating the murders. She knows things that nobody but Gianna's team knows: The names of the victims and method of their murders, and she's going to write a story. Mimi thinks people--especially gay people--should know they could be in danger. As they both pursue the killer following different paths, their growing attracting to each other is a problem neither welcomes. Then there's the fact that the killer has an eye on Gianna's locked closed door. The nation's capital is not an easy place in which to keep a secret.

Washingto, DC, the nation's capital, is a magnificently beautiful city--a city divided by race and by class--and no one knows this truth better than Police Lieutenant Gianna Maglione, head of the Hate Crimes Unit, and investigative newspaper reporter Mimi Patterson. Beyond the marble facades of the monuments, on the side streets off the wide, tree-lined avenues, there lurks an ugliness that Mimi and Gianna get paid to scrutinize. Bits and pieces of stories about rich boys who like to hurt women, prostitutes, vulnerable women on the streets alone, at night, making them perfect targets--Gianna has heard the stories, Mimi has heard the stories, and once again the cop and the reporter are on the trail of the same killer. It will be a difficult hunt because rich boys have rich parents who protect them. But who protects an 80-year old concentration camp survivor when Skinhead neo-Nazis camp outside her house in the middle of the night yelling threats? The cops, right? Wrong--when no laws have been broken. One of Gianna's young cops in the HCU who thinks the law is wrong sets out on her own to protect a frightened old woman  and and pays the price. Newspaper stories that show the Skinheads as cowardly bullies make reporters targets along with the cops. And Mimi still will go out in the middle of the night when a young prostitute calls her for help because she saw the killer--and the killer saw her. The songs of the night.

We live in a youth-oriented culture--and nobody knows that better than a 50+year old woman looking for love. Despite all the commercials featuring silver haired characters, film and television still cast 30-year old women as the love interests of 60-year old men, and 60-year old women are hard to find on screen unless a witch or a bag lady is called for. So many 50+women looking for what they see as a last chance at love have taken to the internet. And if she is from a small town, is financially secure, and is willing to relocate--that love is waiting for her in Washington, DC! Lured not really to DC but to is Maryland and Virginia suburbs, and then to secluded lesbian bars where they are total strangers, the confused, lonely women do what confused, lonely people everywhere do: They talk to the bartender. But this bartender really cares about these confused, lonely women, and when the women begin to disappear, the bartender alerts her good friend who just happens to be Lt. Gianna Maglione, head of the DC Police Department's Hate Crimes Unit. All Gianna's senses go on alert because what she knows that her bartender friend does not is the existence of Jane Does in the morgue. Investigative newspaper reporter Mimi Patterson hears a version of the story from a couple of different sources, and while this isn't usually her kind of story--her reputation was built on sending sleazy, corrupt politicians and public officials to jail--she finds the common denominator, the path that always led her to the take-down of the corrupt officials. Follow the money was her rule. All those missing women were quite well-to-do. What happened to their houses and cars and bank accounts? But Gianna and the cops can answer those questions, too--and faster than Mimi can. But another question prods her: What's wrong with our culture that we so easily side-line women of a certain age? And why would smart, talented, wealthy women embrace danger--or worse--for one last chance at love? 

Politics, gender identity, religion--and hatred--intersect and collide in this fourth Mimi Patterson/Gianna Maglione mystery, and the hatred doesn't come from just outside the vulnerable gay and lesbian community, though there is more than enough of that to go around. This time it seems that splinter religious and police groups have joined forces to make life hellish for the women who frequent two bars/night clubs in a couple of rough DC neighborhoods. To make matters worse, Police Lieutenant Gianna Maglione's Hate Crimes Unit knew nothing of these establishments until a murder and rape introduce them to her. Women who should have felt safe under the protection the HCU instead became victims and Gianna is equal part guilty and angry. As Gianna rushes to correct her error, Mimi delves into the corruption in the places that should be safe havens for all--the church and the police department--and finds herself a target. And for the first time, Mimi and Gianna join forces to expose corrupt cops who hide behind equally corrupt preachers who hide behind scripture to justify their hatred of homosexuals. But another problem for the crime-busting women is a huge thing that is not a crime at all but which could prove to be just as devastating: The hatred within the community of gay women for some of their own, women who identify as Doms and Ags, mostly young Blacks and Latinas who appear super-masculine in dress and sometimes in behavior and who are "distasteful" and threatening to their mainstream sisters. This is new knowledge for Mimi and Gianna, and it calls upon them to investigate their own feelings and beliefs based not on the law but on what is right and wrong.