Night Songs by Penny Mickelbury

Night Songs

Penny Mickelbury

From one alley to the next in the seamy underside of our nation’s capital, the city’s top reporter, Mimi Patterson investigates the disappearance of two prostitutes, her sources on a potentially huge story. Her partner, Lt. Gianna Maglione, head of the city’s Hate Crime Unit is fighting mad. Murdered hookers are a low priority for the city’s police department; but just because they’re prostitutes, doesn’t mean it isn’t a hate crime.

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No one knows better than Police Lieutenant Gianna Maglione, head of the Hate Crimes Unit, that America’s majestic capital city is a city divided – by race and by class.

No one has seen these divisions more clearly that Afro-American Mimi Patterson in her works as an investigative newspaper reporter, works that puts her in constant professional jeopardy with her lover Gianna.

Beyond the marble facades of the city, on the sidestreets off the wide boulevards, amid the disenfranchised, Mimi investigates fragmentary reports of hate crimes against certain kinds of women. Gianna already knows about 3 murders and that in high-crime, high-violence Washington, these killings are low police priority. After all, street prostitutes are worthless throw-away women, who cares if they’re being stabbed to death, who cares how many are dead, or why?

Gianna and Mimi care passionately. And when their investigations unexpectedly reach into a high echelon of government, they uncover a lethal adversary – and face each other in the kind of uncompromising professional collision each of them dreads.

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From Library Journal

Police Lt. Gianna Maglione, who heads the Hate Crimes Unit in Washington, D.C., insists that a series of hooker murders belongs to her department: someone killed these women just for being women. Her lover, on the other hand, investigates the cases because she wants a good story for her newspaper. Since the two women have collided before in the course of work (Keeping Secrets, Naiad Pr., 1994), the conflicts arising from their parallel pursuits come as no surprise. Occasional grandstanding and amateurish passages weaken the diverse cast, compassionate protagonist, and realistic surrounds. Wait for demand.

Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

The screech of tires, a woman’s screams and tears, gunshots, the moans of the dying–these are some of the night songs in the fast-paced, tightly written second mystery starring Lt. Gianna Maglione, head of the hate crimes unit of the Washington, D.C., police. Yet, some of the book’s night songs are melodies of love as Maglione and her lover, reporter Mimi Patterson, cry together with passion over a background of sirens and neighbors’ stereos. The book’s fictional insider’s look at the nation’s capital uses the ritualistic slayings of street prostitutes as a vehicle for exploring the shifting priorities of police work, in which, all too often, victims are seen as worthless throwaways. In the ensuing grimly compelling tale of power and privilege, street people, drugs, and despair, Patterson’s professional path often leads to head-on clashes with her police lieutenant lover. Whitney Scott

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