All the Muscle You Need by Diana McRae

Missing someone? Lost track of most people you ever knew? Eileen Goldeen has. She and Ruthie were as close as sisters once. Then strange things began to happen and one day, six years ago, Ruthie was gone.

Now, thirty-something and caught in a dreary marriage, Eileen longs for that old friendship. When she sees the ad in a local paper, “Something Plaguing You? Eliza Pirex investigates!” she decides to hire Eliza to find her lost friend. Eliza soon discovers that Ruthie’s disappearance is steeped in mystery and danger.

With her fellow Oakland detective, Dennis, and her lover, the beautiful Honor, at her side, Eliza looks for Ruthie and runs smack into Eileen’s bearish husband, a phantom psychiatrist who stalks like a cat, and much more than she bargained for.

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From Publishers Weekly
First-novelist McRae gives her detective-heroine, Eliza Pirex, both dignity and savvy, and her first-person narrative unfolds an intricate story deftly and slowly. Eileen Goldeen hires Pirex to locate Ruth Gold, a troubled old college friend who disappeared several years earlier. Eileen is also neurotic, and McRae successfully conveys the difficulties of communication between Eileen and Eliza, and the latter's satisfaction with resulting breakthroughs. Clues and motives are carefully revealed, then complicated by such developments as switched identities. Eliza's self-awareness makes her a more accessible character than Eileen, but the nuances of her (and her lesbian lover's) behavior are so closely and lengthily observed that they interrupt the rhythm of the inventive plot. Eliza's location of Ruth is unexpected and chilling, and her credible decision to honor Ruth's wish that her whereabouts not be disclosed raises this above the average mystery.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.