Reviews

She Came by the Book by Mary Wings

hailstorm3812's review

adventurous dark emotional mysterious medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

If you like tropey pulpy detective novels and are queer, this is a fun time. Be warned that the terminology and ideology are quite 90's (especially for bi and trans people), but it is more diverse than I expected. I loved how pretty much every character was extremely messy and out for their own interests. While it is fictional I kept being struct by how the problems the community faces haven't really changes from bigots to rainbow capitalism. It's not the best written book but I had a lot of fun, and it's even more special because I got this book about a murder in the Gay and Lesbian archive at the Lesbian Archive at Pride.

sonnet_reads's review

January review for Book Riot's Read Harder 2018: She Came By The Book (An Emma Victor Mystery) by Mary Wings, 1996. [mystery by a person of color or LGBTQ+ author category]

Any story that opens with "As a lesbian," is going to be a good story. And so begins She Came By The Book, a mystery written by Mary Wings that I picked up when an LGBTQ+ Center was having a library sale. I had never heard of Mary Wings before, but apparently she's a pretty established queer mystery fiction writer, so I'm excited to have a new author to look for.


This book was a lot of fun. Sure, it was a little dated, but it was pretty visceral and descriptive: I've only visited San Francisco once, last year for a few hours before my flight back home, but I felt like I could gather the feel of the place with Wings' words. She Came By The Book is set in San Francisco and follows Emma Victor, a sort of jack-of-all-trades PI who has her foot pretty solidly in the gay scene and community's elite. She is entrusted with the care of the remaining papers of deceased State Representative and Gay Icon Harold Blooming, whom she worked for before he died. She is assaulted shortly after she receives this assignment, and shortly after a woman is poisoned at the gala at which she is meant to present the papers for posterity. She digs into the politics of the SF gay scene at the time, which was interesting but slightly tired and cliched in terms of it falling on a lot of stereotypes. Like I said, this is not to say that it wasn't a fun read, but it was not the most thrilling mystery nor the most eye-opening commentaries.