Apparition Alley: A Kate Delafield Mystery

Katherine V. Forrest

Publisher: Berkley Trade (December 12, 2000)

ISBN-13: 978-0425176771

PSRP: $13.00

In Apparition Alley, a gunfight erupts during what should be a routine drug bust, and Kate Delafield is shot by another officer -but no one wants to fess up to the misfire. Soon, Kate finds a connection between her own "accident" and the suspicious demise of another cop-who may have been on the verge of outing gay and lesbian officers...

"Few mystery writers combine such an intelligent take on issues with such solid storytelling."-Publishers Weekly

"Apparition Alley is an unqualified knockout."- Lambda Book Report

 Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

LAPD homicide detective Kate Delafield is shot in a routine drug bust. It's her first line-of-fire accident, but when it turns out that the bullet that winged her came not from the suspect's gun but from a police weapon, the case takes on a different hue. Was Kate's injury the result of a bias against gays and lesbians in the department? And how does it tie into the charges levied against Luke Taggart, a cop whose partner, a closeted gay man, was killed in what he believes was a hate crime?

When Kate is reluctantly dragooned into defending Taggart at a departmental hearing on charges that could lead to a murder indictment, she tries to ignore the homophobia that seems to be the common link between her shooting and the murder of Taggart's partner. But the psychotherapy required after an officer-involved shooting forces her to confront her guilt over the suicide of another member of the department and her ambivalence about outing her gay colleagues or even coming out of the closet herself.

Forrest uses both the current tarnish on the reputation of the Rampart-era LAPD and the tangled personal and political implications of sexual diversity to good advantage in this well-crafted mystery, the fifth in the Kate Delafield series. The most effective scenes, in the office of the psychologist she's forced to see, add another layer of complexity to Kate's character. This is a heroine who continues to evolve and grow with every new adventure. --Jane Adams

From Kirkus Reviews

Watch your back when you're arresting a drug suspect for the LAPD. If you don't, the resulting gunplay could leave the suspect dead and you wounded by friendly fire--and after you're released from the hospital, as Det. Kate Delafield learns, your problems really begin: answering endless questions for a review board, wondering which of your colleagues shot you, sitting through hours of psychotherapy sessions, and finally getting picked by Officer Luke Taggart as the representative for the hearing convened to determine why he shot a drug dealer of his own in a late-night hostage-taking. Taggart tells Kate he chose her only because she's a good investigator whose recent experience with the system will make her sympathetic to him. But he doesn't act as if he wants sympathy, even though his colleagues in the Hollywood Division, outraged that he informed on one partner who ate his gun, froze him out even before he lost the second, Tony Ferrera, in a liquor-store holdup. Instead, Taggart, who insists against all the evidence that he never fired his gun in Apparition Alley, alternately acts secretive and suspicious, and goes into paranoid attack mode by insisting Ferrera was killed by cops because of some story he was about to tell that would blow the lid off a conspiracy of silence at the troubled LAPD. Forrest (Liberty Square, 1996, etc.) gives full weight to her lesbian heroine's anguish at coming to terms with her personal demons without ever swamping a police-corruption plot that could have been plucked from today's headlines. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.