Hen’s Teeth by Manda Scott

Manda Scott's first ever book was short listed for the Orange Prize and is packed with drama.

Midnight in Glasgow is not the best time to be faced with a dead body. Particularly if the body in question is your ex-lover and the woman grieving at her bedside used to be your friend. Add a corpse packed with Temazepam, a genetic engineer with an unstable past and a killer on the loose with a knife and you have all the reason you need to walk away and never come back. Glasgow therapist Dr Kellen Stewart has put the past behind her: medical career, relationship, life on the farm in the country. Thenthe phone rings and Bridget is dead – the only lover who ever counted.The local doctor says it's a heart attack, the police think it's suicide. Kellen knows that it's neither but is she willing to rake up the past to prove it? Dragged into a world of rogue doctors, bent genetic engineers and killers who gut their victims as a warning, Kellen must face her own past as much as the very real terrors of the present to stop the killing – or she'll be next.

-----

Murder runs in families. How could a healthy forty-one-year old woman die of cardiac arrest? When Glasgow psychiatrist Kellen Stewart learns of the death of her ex-lover Bridget Donnelly, she quickly suspects foul play. Then she discovers that Bridget's brother, Malcolm, died of the same cause just weeks before - hours after bringing some hens to Bridget's country farmhouse for safekeeping. And now those hens are missing... With the help of a friendly pathologist who numbers breaking and entering among her more formidable skills, Kellen investigates the deaths. The trail of evidence will take her into a dangerous maze of valuable hens, lethal eggs, bodies that vanish from the morgue... and biomedical marvels that lead to murder...

A real classic for lesbian crime fans.
(libertas.co.uk)