Dead Beat

This year Spinsters Ink began reprinting the Kate Brannigan mystery series by the award-winning Val McDermid, who is also the author of the lesbian mystery series featuring Lindsay Gordon. In this first book, Kate is hired by a famous musician to find his long-lost lyricist Moira. She succeeds in tracking Moira to her girlfriend's house, and thinks all ends happily ever after with the reunion, until Moira is murdered in the musician's house. Now Kate is pulled into the murder investigation, and finds more suspects and motives than she anticipated, all the while dealing with her job as a private investigator and with a distracting boyfriend. "Dead Beat" is a marvelous introduction to the series and showcases McDermid's talents as a mystery writer. Now let's all thank Spinsters Ink for bringing Brannigan back.

Dead Beat by Val McDermid St. Martins Press, New York 1992I read with a great deal of pleasure two books by Val McDermid featuring Dr. Tony Hill and wanted to see how I would like her series with Lady PI Kate Brannigan. In this book, Kate is put on the trail of a missing lyricist and bed partner of a rising rock star. The missing Moira has been through a really tough time venturing into heroin addiction and prostitution and has finally ended up with her lesbian Social Worker. When Kate finds her, she agrees to come back and join the rock star in writing songs but not in bed. However, she is soon found dead with a full caste of likely suspects. Kate very cleverly finds the murderer amidst the hangers-on in the rock star's mansion and flushes him out in a clever maneuver. This book is perhaps not quite as graphic in its descriptions of crime scenes as the other two books, but Kate is a very exciting, thoroughly modern young woman with a quick wit and Thai boxing experience. I thoroughly enjoyed this book.