Fortune Favors the Dead by Stephen Spotswood

 

This may not have been as ambitious a novel as last night's, spinning pulp mystery with queerness elevated from subtext to text isn't something wild and new (Christopher Moore did it with a touch less queerness and truckloads of humor in *Noir* and *Razzmatazz*) but this is a more enjoyable, and I think better, novel. It kinda reads like mostly a riff on the Nero Wolfe books, but I suspect there are others in the mix (the fact the narrator never mentions Rex Stout among the novelist she enjoys reading seems like a bit of an authorial ...  choice, maybe an attempt to avoid direct comparisons to the closest inspiration, I dunno) though the primary detective--the narrator's employer--is more active in a getting out and getting things done way than Wolfe is, in spite of her multiple sclerosis. This is Book One of the series, and it's enjoyable enough that I can see it plausibly leading to more, but it's not so charming that I'm going to read them.