Brett Higgins is dead. The underworld believes it. The police filed it away. In California, she’s Samantha Peterson—a quiet life with her lover Allie Sullivan, the daily work of becoming someone who doesn’t accumulate bodies. The reinvention was almost holding.
Then she finds a butcher’s knife. Blood-soaked clothes. Someone else’s violence, or an echo of her own, or a message designed to pull her back into the life she’s spent years trying to leave behind.
Szymanski doesn’t permit escape through reinvention. The past in these novels is never truly past. It’s dormant, waiting for the specific circumstance that will make it walk through the door again. This is the fifth book in the Brett Higgins series—it requires the reader to know who Brett is, what she’s done, the weight she carries. It requires understanding that her history of violence is simultaneously her deepest liability and the only tool she fully trusts when everything else fails.
The books operate on the principle that transformation is possible but fragile. That you can build a different life. That the life you built before will still reach for you when circumstances align. Szymanski tracks the tension between who Brett is trying to become and who Brett actually is—and what happens when those two versions have to reconcile with blood and a butcher’s knife forcing the conversation.
Details
| ISBN: 9781931513524 |
| Subtitle: |
| Genre: Mystery |
| Subject(s): Fiction / General; Fiction / Lesbian; Fiction / Mystery & Detective / General; Fiction / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths |
| Publication Date: 2003-10-01 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: Bella Books |
| Language: English |
| Format: Paperback |
| Pages: 207 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: Therese Szymanski is the author of the Brett Higgins Motor City Thriller series, a long-running lesbian crime series set largely in Detroit. When the Dead Speak is the fifth installment. Szymanski is also an editor and anthologist in lesbian fiction, with multiple collections to her name. |
| Book_ID: 106142 |