In the Game by Nikki Baker

In the Game

Nikki Baker

Always there for each other-friends since business school, where their black faces were lost in a sea of white. As Ginny observes ‘Lovers don’t last but friends can be forever’

Now Bev is in trouble. Her lover’s bullet-riddled body has been found behind a cHicago lesbian bar. The police suspect a hate crime, but Ginny, privy to her own information about the murdered Kelsey, thinks otherwise.

Threading her nimble way through the cultural byways and politics of the lesbian society she knows, Ginny asks a lot of questions about Kelsey’s death, but finds few answers. Just who is the mysterious other woman in Kelsey’s life? And is it true that Kelsey was about to be arrested for embezzlement?

Meanwhile, Ginny has acquired a thorny problem of her own. A brief fling with a high-powered lawyer has turned into obsession, and threatens Ginny’s long-term relationship.

In the game is sharp, funny and on the mark-fresh perspective on a diverse lesbian community.

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From Publishers Weekly

When businesswoman Virginia Kelly, a black lesbian, meets her old college chum Bev Johnson for drinks late one night, Bev confides that her lover, Kelsey, is seeing another woman. Ginny had picked up that gossip months ago, but she is shocked when the next morning’s papers report that Kelsey was found murdered behind the very bar where Ginny and Bev had met. Worried that her friend could be implicated, Ginny decides to track down Kelsey’s killer and also contacts a lawyer, Susan Coogan. Susan takes an immediate, intense liking to Ginny, complicating Ginny’s relationship with her live-in lover. Meanwhile Ginny’s inquiries heat up when she learns the Feds suspected Kelsey of embezzling from her employer. Woven into the narrative are observations on lesbian life and on prejudice, which are undercut when the author resorts to stereotyping: Ginny’s boss, for example, is a drunken Irishman. Still, an entertaining assortment of female characters makes Baker’s debut promising, even though the plot’s logic does not stand up to close scrutiny: the police do not suspect Bev of the murder, making Ginny’s sleuthing to save her friend appear superfluous.

Copyright 1991 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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