Edited Out by Lisa Haddock

Edited Out

Lisa Haddock

Carmen Ramirez, twenty-four-year-old daughter of an Irish mother and a Puerto Rican fater, has returned home. Home is Frontier City, Oklahoma, population 375,000, where Carmen was raised by her courageous, stubborn, loving, and homophobic grandmother.

Now a newspaper copy editor, Carmen is assigned to assist in the update of a two-year-old news story about a dead lesbian school teacher who apparently committed suicide in the aftermath of killing a twelve-year-old girl.

Aided by the newspaper library clerk Julia Nichols, Carmen challenges the investigation, finding many more questions than answers in this ‘solved’ homicide/suicide. And innocent Julia finds more than a few answers to her own questions about Carmen….

Taking the inquisitive, determined Carmen off the story does not take her off the case. The powers-that-be underestimate Carmen, and the moral heart of townspeople confronting their consciences in the face of a cover-up.

And when Carmen’s grandmother rejects her for resuming her ‘perverted’ life, she discovers that she has bequeathed to her granddaughter a large measure of her own courage and stubbornness.

You won’t soon forget Carmen and Julia. Or the woman named Crystal, who runs the town’s only women’s bar. Or the personal dignity of other people in Frontier City, Oklahoma, in this striking story of love and loyalty and making real moral choices.


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Details

ISBN 1562800779
Genre Mystery
Copyright Date 1994
Publication Date Apr-94
Publisher Naiad Press
Format Trade Paperback
No. of Pages 213
Series Carmen Ramirez Mystery
# in Series 1
Notes From Publishers Weekly

Carmen Ramirez, Haddock’s 24-year-old Irish-Puerto Rican lesbian protagonist, is no detective. Rather, she is a copy editor at her hometown newspaper in Frontier City, Okla., where she lives in her homophobic grandmother’s renovated garage and mourns the end of her first relationship. Assigned to assist a columnist, Carmen begins to dig into the two-year-old story of a lesbian teacher who molested and killed a 12-year-old, then committed suicide–or did she? Carmen is pulled off the story, but she continues her investigation, asking tough questions and tangling with everyone, including an at-first suspicious lesbian bartender, her own boss, the schools, the powerful local church and, of course, her irascible grandmother. A trail of cover-ups and half-truths leads Carmen and love-interest/sidekick Julia to Lovell Taft University, where the murdered girl’s sister is sequestered with her secrets. As Carmen draws closer to the truth, she risks job, relationships and even her life. Edited Out is a fast-paced murder mystery with more complexity than the usual fare. The characters are likable if somewhat unidimensional and broadly drawn, and the writing is straightforward and generally clean, with a fast tempo and a plot that ebbs and flow engagingly.

Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Language English
Rating NotRated
BookID 3428

Author: LFWBooks