After seventy-five years of respectability, the Amelia Gower Women's Club is in trouble. One distinguished director has been strangled. Another, the founder's granddaughter, has taken a fatal plunge down the club's elegant staircase. As soon as restaurateur-sleuth Jane Lawless begins a bit of discreet snooping, wheels within wheels begin to turn, meshing the private lives of Gower friends and family with the club's inner workings and the wealthy Gower Foundation's supersecret agenda. Even Jane's new lover, Dorrie, is somehow involved. The way things are going, the Gower Club murders may well be Jane's last case . . . .
Ellen Hart is the author of twenty-five crime novels in two different series.?? She is a five-time winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Mystery, a three-time winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Best Popular Fiction, a three-time winner of the Golden Crown Literary Award, a recipient of the Alice B Medal, and was made an official GLBT Literary Saint at the Saints & Sinners Literary Festival in New Orleans in 2005. ?? Entertainment Weekly??named her one of the "101 Movers and Shakers in the Gay Entertainment Industry." For the past twelve years, Ellen has taught "An Introduction to Writing the Modern Mystery" through the The Loft Literary Center, the largest independent writing community in the nation. Ellen's newest Sophie Greenway mystery is No Reservations Required, (Ballantine, June 2005). The Mirror and the Mask, the seventeenth Jane Lawless mystery, was released by St. Martin's/Minotaur in November 2009.?? Ellen lives in Minneapolis with her partner of 32 years.
