Hallowed Murder

Hallowed Murder, the debut novel in Ellen Hart’s Jane Lawless series, makes for an enjoyable read as a cozy mystery; however, this novel also serves as a time capsule of sorts. With marriage equality the law of the land even in Alabama (well, in early 2015, nearly so anyway), we forget how often people — even people you’d expect to know better — openly expressed blatant homophobia in the late 1980s.

So, children, gather round, and please let me tell you about the bad old days. Condemning gays to the fiery inferno and expressing open revulsion and horror at “crimes against nature” and other such rot today exists only in right-wing megachurches in the South and Glenn Beck’s show, but it was not always so. Same-sex unions — show more no one even dared use the term marriage then — did even exist in ground-breaking Denmark until October 1989! People could lose their jobs, their apartments, and even custody of their children should anyone suspect that they might be gay. So remaining in the closet was not a betrayal but a survival skill.

So, while Minneapolis caterer Jane Lawless may be comfortable in her own skin, she’s not fool enough to come out to the members of her sorority Kappa Alpha Sigma — even after it’s revealed that one of its members, found drowned in a lake, was romantically involved with a fellow University of Minnesota co-ed. Police, still un-PC enough to express disgust at the girl’s sexual orientation, quickly dismiss the case as a suicide, but Jane suspects otherwise, as do other sorority members. So, in addition to the question of who killed Allison Lord, there’s the question of whether or not Jane will remain safely in the closet or make a stand.

I grew to like Jane, although her BFF, the cynical, whining, and curmudgeonly theater director Cordelia Thorne, was rather off-putting. I’m looking forward to then next novel in the series, Vital Lies, and to see Jane and the gay-rights movement both evolve in the pages of this series. show less

I had to read this for a class. The first lesbian novel I've ever read. I enjoyed it. A young female coed is found dead and everyone thinks it's a suicide because she recently came out as a lesbian. Jane Lawless is also a lesbian but she doesn't believe the young girl killed herself, so she decides to find the murderer.

The very first book in the Jane Lawless series, this book is set in the 80s (and written then also, I think) and might seem odd to those of us used to the modern tech - internet and cell phones, just to mention a few things that are not in the book... The book does a good job of introducing us to what I am hoping will be main characters that flow through the series. The characters are human and complex; the murderer was not obvious. Many red herrings were dragged across the path on the way to the solution.

The Audio version definitely has some volume control issues - the sound goes up and down. The reader did a decent job, though, and it was not distracting. The whisper sync worked as it was supposed to.

Stilted dialogue, poorly plotted, swift unrealistic ending. There's a kernel of a great buddy relationship between Jane Lawless and Cordelia Thorn but it's undeveloped in this debut. The series has continued and won awards, so she must get better. I would rate it only 1 star normally, but since that means "I hated it" in this system, I think that's too harsh.

A little dry, but thoroughly enjoyable book.