Caitlin Reece

Created by Lauren Wright Douglas
Pseudonym of Linda J. Wright

Fortyish feminist and lesbian CAITLIN REECE used to be with the Crown Attorney office, but when we meet her in her debut, The Always Anonymous Beast (1987), she’s squeezing out a living as a private peeper, working the rain-drenched but oh-so-clean and touristy streets of Victoria, British Columbia.

She may be soft-hearted, particularly when it comes to animals, but she’s no New Age powder puff. She’s a tough cookie, and never leaves home without her trusty .357 Magnum.

She lives alone with her rescued cat, Repo, and has a slew of friends who help out occasionally, including Gray Ng, who claims to be a psychic, Francis the Ferret, a hacker pal, and photographer Lester.

One of the better, and more successful of the countless “dyke dicks” spawned by the folks at Naiad Press in the late eighties and nineties, and certainly one of the longer runs. The second in the series, Ninth Life (1990), won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Mystery.

After apparently wrapping up the Caitlin Reece series, Lauren Wright Douglas (a pseudonym of Linda J. Wright) tried her hand at another mystery series, featuring used book dealer and amateur sleuth Allison O’Neill, but it only lasted two books. She pretty much fell off the face of the earth after that, as far as I could tell, until she re-emerged in 2018 with a whole new series, published under her own name, featuring Kieran Yeats, a private investigator specializing in animal rights cases.

NOVELS

Report respectfully submitted by Kevin Burton Smith.

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