Showing results by narrator "Dina Pearlman" in LGBTQ+

In The Lives of Michel Foucault, David Macey quotes the iconic French philosopher as speaking “nostalgically...of 'an unforgettable evening on LSD, in carefully prepared doses, in the desert night, with delicious music, [and] nice people'". This came to pass in 1975, when Foucault spent Memorial Day weekend in Southern California at the invitation of Simeon Wade - ostensibly to guest-lecture at the Claremont Graduate School where Wade was an assistant professor, but in truth to explore what he called the Valley of Death. 

Once again Lillian Byrd is down on her luck, strumming her mandolin for spare quarters alongside Blind Lonnie, Detroit's resident blues guitarist. But a chance encounter with her childhood friend Duane is about to completely capsize her life. One summer night, when Lillian was 12, flames ripped through the Polka Dot, a bar owned and run by her parents. Three bodies were found in the ashes: those of her mother, her father, and the barmaid, Trix Hawley. Or so Lillian has always thought.

Lillian Byrd is a small-time reporter with a flair for making big-time mistakes - like getting fired for fending off the boss' son with an X-Acto knife and breaking up with her girlfriend for no good reason. So her investigation into the disappearances of women in the Detroit area might not be the best idea. But when one of the missing women turns up dead and Lillian recognizes the bizarrely mutilated corpse, she's in too deep to get out.

After her narrow brush with death in Holy Hell, you'd think Lillian Byrd would have learned to keep her head down, but when a friend in crisis calls from California, Lillian jumps on a plane and wings her way from Detroit to Palm Springs - and danger. It's the long weekend of the Dinah Shore golf tournament, the wildest women's sporting event in the world, when thousands of lesbians descend on the desert and take over. At a prechampionship party, Lillian leaps into a slippery romance with a top LPGA star. But her superstar athlete has a secret.

Lillian Byrd has been searching her soul after the gut-wrenching experience of killing someone in self-defense. Scrabbling to make ends meet, she takes a job as a quasi detective, solving life's little mysteries for a pair of eccentric women in one of Detroit's last prestigious neighborhoods. When she spots a corpse on the next-door lawn, she jumps back into honest work as an investigative journalist. Her friend, Mercedes, reveals that the dead woman, Abby Rawson, played on a women's softball team she manages and pressures Lillian into taking her spot.

Lillian Byrd's battered Chevrolet Caprice is convulsing through the last of its death throes; her pet rabbit, Todd, ails; and as usual she's single - and flat broke. For a few extra bucks, she signs on to help an old friend, retired police detective Erma Porrocks, renovate her house, but of course nothing ever goes smoothly in the life of Lillian Byrd.