Description:
San Francisco dominatrix Elizabeth Cromwell is drawn into the sudden disappearance of Edith Barlow, an heir to the estate of an old friend of Elizabeth's, a woman who herself had vanished seven years earlier.
Brief description: At age 14, Jennifer Mason left Kansas for Malibu. With a nagging alter ego, neither able to talk herself into or out of a commitment to writing, she took the coast road to San Francisco. In an abandoned Prohibition speakeasy, she invented the English Department, where she discovered a voice in a brand of professional dominance as mysterious in its puritan fantasy as it is comical in its enactments of how we need to feel. She is the author of five previous novels, The Oddball Gypsy Raconteur, Valedictorian, Sebastopol, Tors Lake, and Partitions of Unity. Her stories follow their characters through scenes of what they think they see when they are most confused, the way things usually are when we struggle for an erotic connection. She lives and writes on Noe Street.
Review Quotes:
"Mason's prose is stylish and layered... Readers will find it a pleasure to parse these rich and rambling chapters with a sense of melancholy and unease that feels true to real life... The murkiness of the tale and its California setting will call to mind the works of Thomas Pynchon, but Mason creates an atmosphere that is very much all her own."
-Kirkus Reviews