Mystery Women Authors

Lauren Wright Douglas

Biography

Lauren Wright Douglas was born in Canada in 1947. She grew up in a military family and spent part of her childhood in Europe. Lauren moved from Oak Bay, British Columbia, to the Southwest desert some years ago, but the lure of the ocean drew her westward again. She now writes on the Oregon coast where she lives with her partner Martha and an assortment of cats.

Lauren's second novel, NINTH LIFE, a book in the Caitlin Reece series -- won the 1990 Lambda Award for Best Lesbian Mystery. She is at work on another animal-rights novel, which is in neither the Caitlin Reece nor the Allison O'Neil series.

Books

Allison O'Neill Mysteries

Death at Lavender Bay (1)

When Allison O'Neil is called for the reading of a relative's will, she is astonished to find herself an heiress. It seems her Aunt Grace - from whom she received little more than birthday and Christmas cards - has left Allison a bed-and-breakfast in the tiny town of Lavender Bay, Oregon.

From the moment she arrives to claim her legacy, however, Allison is haunted by an uneasy feeling that things aren't quite what they seem. Although the locals express deep fondness for Aunt Grace, no one will discuss the circumstances of her death. And the odd assortment of people who live at the bed-and-breakfast are not paying guests, they're permanent residents - each of whom has benefited financially from Aunt Grace's untimely demise...

Allison's worst fears are realized when she discovers that Aunt Grace allegedly drowned while snorkeling - an unlikely pursuit for a woman who couldn't swim and was terrified of water!

Published Naiad Press 1996

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Swimming Cat Cove (2)

In the peaceful Oregon town of Lavender Bay, displaced Californian Allison O'Neil is busily working through a long list of things she needs to do to make her newly inherited bed and breakfast profitable. Things are going smoothly until the daughter of the B&B's live-in handywoman brings home a bedraggled nine-year-old named Minou. The child's mother is in jail for shoplifting, and the last time Minou saw her drunken father he had just lost everything he had - including her - in a winner-take-all card game with some L.A. pornographers. That's when Minou started running for her life. The girls beg Allison to let Minou stay for a week - just until her mom is released from jail - and Allison reluctantly agrees. Minou is a model houseguest, but before the week is up, Allison O'Neil is going to have a couple of unexpected things on her to-do list: find the girls and stay alive!

Published Naiad Press 1997

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Caitlin Reece Mysteries

The Always Anonymous Beast (1)

Meet Caitlin Reece. Smart, cool, tough. A dropout from conventional life. Highly competent in her chosen profession. She has no office, obtains clients by referral only, and never leaves home without her .357 Magnum Smith and Wesson.

Val Frazier, Victoria's star TV anchorwoman, is Caitlin's newest client. She is the victim of a viciously homophobic blackmailer who has discovered her relationship with Tonia Konig. Tonia is a lesbian-feminist professor, an outspoken, passionately committed proponent of nonviolence. She is enraged by her own helplessness, she is outraged by Caitlin's challenge to her most fundamental beliefs, and by Caitlin herself, whom she considers "a thug."

As Caitlin stalks the blackmailer and his accomplices through the byways of the city of Victoria, she uncovers ever darker layers of danger surrounding Tonia. And she struggles against a new and altogether unwanted complication: she is increasingly attracted to the woman who despises her.

Published Naiad Press 1988

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Ninth Life (2)

The uncompromising private detective Caitlin Reece once again prowls her terrain of Victoria, British Columbia, investigating a case as dramatic and immediate as today's headlines. Caitlin is hired by a woman, code-named Shrew, to pick up a package. Caitlin is sickened to the depths of her being by the contents of the package: a blind and maimed cat, and photographs of animal experimentation. And now Shrew is dead. A member of Ninth life, a militant animal rights organization, she had infiltrated Living Word, a cosmetics company. The other members of Ninth Life suspect she was betrayed by someone within their own ranks, and murdered because of what she learned.

The director of Living World has made vehement public denials that his company is experimenting on animals for product development. Caitlin sees only one answer: to penetrate the security systems protecting Living World - alarms, dogs, guards -and discover the truth for herself.

Published Naiad Press 1990

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The Daughters of Artemis (3)

It's not enough that the so-called Full-Moon Rapist is prowling the streets of Victoria, BC. Sean Macklin has just been paroled. This particular man, the personification of everything Caitlin holds evil, is the reason she left the Crown Prosecutor's office years ago to ply her lonely and demanding profession.

The release of Macklin, who has sworn vengeance on his victim and on Caitlin herself, coincides with Caitlin's newest case: to find Jess, heir to a trust fund, who has secreted herself within a woman's commune. Led to the commune by magnetic Diana McNeil, Caitlin discovers the Daughters of Artemis - women bonded together with an agenda that presents a profound moral dilemma for Caitlin...

Falling under the spell of the alluring Diana, vulnerable as never before, facing the menace of Sean Macklin, Caitlin must be strong as never before. Lives depend on it.

Published Naiad Press 1991

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A Tiger's Heart (4)

An urgent phone call brings to painful life a ghost from Caitlin's past. Jonna must see her. Now. But the person who gets off the little seaplane from Vancouver is not the woman Caitlin loved more than twenty years ago, but her daughter, Jory. "She's dead," Jory tells Caitlin. "My mom is dead." The police find no body. And suspect only ten your-old Jory's overactive imagination. But Jory knows what she saw, and, chillingly, what she wants Caitlin to do: find Kirk Ratliffe, her monstrous father, and kill him.

In her search for Ratliffe and the truth of Jonna's life with him, Caitlin calls on all her resources: Tonia, the loving strength in her life; computer genius Francis the Ferret; photographer and helpmate Lester, and, indispensably, the wraith-like Gray Ng. Caitlin cannot conceive of what she will face. For Gray Ng's mysterious intuitions will lead them into lethal danger - and the greatest terror Caitlin has ever known.

Published Naiad Press 1992

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Goblin Market (5)

Who is sending Laura Neal photos from her past - photographs cut and pasted into a gruesome jigsaw puzzle? Laura's lover hires private investigator Caitlin Reece to find out.

An abusive ex-husband is the most likely suspect, but when he proves remarkably elusive, Caitlin enlists the aid of computer-genius Francis the Ferret, and also the mysterious Eliane St. Cyr, an ex-criminologist whose reasons for abandoning her chosen field remain a closely held secret. Caitlin's close friend, Gray Ng, issues an ominous warning to Caitlin, her intuitive anxiety over this case shaped in and ancient dark parable of how monsters in human form - goblin men - come into possession of souls, and will make no deals to relinquish them. Caitlin is too deep with the mesmerizing Eliane to listen to Gray. Then Laura disappears. And Caitlin discovers that Gray's intuition is correct in every horrifying dimension.

Caitlin's ingenuity and courage will be tested as never before. Because she has no choice. She must meet, and bargain with, the goblin men...

Published Naiad Press 1993

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A Rage of Maidens (6)

Clive Culhaine has hired Caitlin to help his troubled young daughter, Andy. Several years ago Andy was the primary witness to a sexual assault on her sister. In the court proceedings that followed, Caitlin, on the prosecuting team, was helpless in the face of the brief prison sentence given to Mal Dennison. Since then, the tragedy has caused the breakup of Andy's family. And now Dennison has been released from jail.

Caitlin's own life has changed. Her long-standing tenants have moved away, she is recovering from an unresolved love affair. And her investigation of Dennison lays bare new dimensions in herself - and unsettling new demarcations in the people around her. In former lover Tonia, in friend Gray Ng, even unscrupulous Francis the Ferret seems altered.

There is one certainty. Caitlin is no longer helpless to deal with Mal Dennison. And she has a weapon even more lethal than the .357 magnum she carries: her own, highly personal, very deadly rage.

Published Naiad Press 1994

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Non- Mystery Books

Mystery and Science Fiction

In the Blood

It is the near future. America, accidental victim of biological warfare, is under forcible quarantine by a world desperate to protect itself from a savage virus aptly named Red Death. Within America itself, entire states have sealed off their borders.

Enclaves exist where the Red Death has not wreaked its havoc, one of them in Arizona. Another is a mysterious and uninfected women's community known as the Gaians, and still another a hidden lesbian group rumoured to offer sanctuary...if they can be found.

Solar-tech Hart, a free Arizonan, is accompanying virologist, Dr Ashe to the California border. Ashe may hold the key to survival: she is bringing an experimental vaccine to Captain Sandoval, Commander of the BioStrike Forces for the Republic of California and her militia women. Sandoval has orders regarding Dr Ashe. Valentin, another officer assigned to Sandoval's unit has her own secret set of orders...

In a primal struggle for survival and safety, Hart and Sandoval find themselves caught in a web of treachery, kidnapping, even murder.

Published Naiad Press 1989

Out of print

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Other sites for author

Naiad Press - publisher of Lauren Wright Douglas

Page created by Leone Moffat.

Last updated 26-Feb-2002