Private Detective Evander "Andy" Mills has been drawn back to the Lavender House estate for a missing person case. Pat, the family butler, has been volunteering for a book service, one that specializes in mailing queer books to a carefully guarded list of subscribers. With bookseller Howard Salzberger gone suspiciously missing along with his address book, everyone on that list, including some of Andy's closest friends, is now in danger.
A search of Howard's bookstore reveals that someone wanted to stop him and his co-owner, Dorothea Lamb, from sending out their next book. The evidence points not just to the Feds, but to the Mafia, who would be happy to use the subscriber list for blackmail.
Andy has to maneuver through both the government and the criminal world, all while dealing with a nosy reporter who remembers him from his days as a police detective and wants to know why he's no longer a cop. With his own secrets closing in on him, can Andy find the list before all the lives on it are at risk?
Set in atmospheric 1950s San Francisco, Rough Pages asks who is allowed to tell their own stories, and how far would you go to seek out the truth.

My Review:

The case that Andy has to solve in Rough Pages begins by circling back to the events of the first book in the series, Lavender House. In that first book, Andy Mills found a purpose, became part of a found family, and solved a murder, all while keeping the police – of which he used to be a part – from learning the truth about the residents of Lavender House.

That every single member of the family, and the staff, were queer. He managed to keep their secrets in spite of his own already being common knowledge – at least among his former ‘brothers in blue’ in the San Francisco Police Department.

So Rough Pages begins by taking Andy back to Lavender House, because they need his detective skills again – even if they don’t know it yet.

The Lamontaine family at Lavender House has adopted a baby. Or nearly so. The paperwork and the inspections and the questions have not quite run their course. It would still be much too easy for social services to take the baby back. If the family’s secret comes out – they certainly will.

At first, the case doesn’t seem like much. A friend of the family, the owner of a queer bookstore, is missing. Nearly all of the family have bought books from the shop. The butler/majordomo, Pat, volunteers there on his days off.

But it’s not just the owner that’s missing. Because he kept a list of all the subscribers to his book service, a kind of book club for queer books, mailed to subscribers all over the state of California – and even beyond. It’s not just that he’s missing – his list is missing too. A list that includes every single member of the Lamontaine family old enough to read.

Mailing ‘dirty’ books through the mail was illegal and ALL books with a hint of queer contents were considered ‘dirty’ automatically. If that list is in the wrong hands, they’re all in trouble and they’ll lose the baby.

So there’s the obvious possibility that Howard and his business partner DeeDee, who is also missing, might have been arrested by the feds, and that the feds have the list.

But it could be worse, because Howard may have gotten himself in trouble with the mob, either because his boyfriend is a mobster’s nephew or because he planned to publish the memoirs of a gay mobster – anonymously, of course. Either of those circumstances is more than enough to land him in big trouble with some very shady characters.

The feds will just ruin everyone’s lives and send as many as possible to jail. But the mob? Blackmail is the most likely outcome. Or, they might send somebody to ‘feed the fishes’. Unless they already have.

Escape Rating A+: I am absolutely hooked on this series, and Rough Pages was a totally worthy successor to the first two books, Lavender House and The Bell in the Fog. And it’s even better and more utterly absorbing in Vikas Adam’s narration, which I’ve had the pleasure of listening to for all three books so far. And OMG but I hope there are more.

I fell into this book so deeply that I had to let it process for a couple of days before I could write anything coherent. With a book this good it takes a while for the ‘SQUEE!” to settle down. I’m not exactly certain that it has even now, but I’ll certainly try.

This is a book that can be read – or listened to – from multiple perspectives with multiple hooks, all of which ‘hook’ the reader rather firmly.

Mystery readers, particularly readers who love noir detective fiction will feel right at home in the foggy streets of Andy’s San Francisco. Andy Mills is exactly the type of hardboiled detective featured in the work of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain – or he would be if Andy wasn’t queer.

At the same time, this series is historical fiction, set in the early 1950s, among San Francisco’s gay community. Also, it’s set at the point in U.S. postwar history where everyone was trying to repair and/or return to a ‘normalcy’ fractured by war. The tolerance of the war period was over and McCarthyism was on the rise, searching for liberals, queers and communists in every closet, under every bed, and any place where anyone who stood up or stood out might ask questions, persecuting and prosecuting them unmercifully in both the courts and the press, driving them out of jobs, homes and even the whole country.

The fear that Andy, his friends, his found family, and the community he serves, live under every day is as palpable as Andy’s personal fear that his former ‘buddies’ in the SFPD will find him and beat him again and again – and that they might not stop when he’s merely ‘near‘ death the next time.

And in this particular case, Andy’s job and his life intersect with an issue that, while it never goes away, has reared its ugly head as high in our present day as it did during the 1950s setting of the story. And that’s censorship and the repression of thought and speech that is always its ultimate goal.

The combination of themes gives this story a resonance from past to present while also telling a terrific story, putting the reader squarely at Andy’s side during a compelling investigation, and feeling right along with him as he does his best to protect the people he has come to hold dear – in a life that he never expected to have.

Some readers will be here for the mystery, some for the history, some for the portrait of gay life in a time and place where everything had to be hidden – and the cost of that attempt at hiding one’s truest self on every action and reaction. And anyone who believes in the power of words and thoughts and books and reading to change lives and form communities – and just how much some parts of society will attempt to suppress those same words and thoughts and even lives, will find Rough Pages to be a story that sticks long after the final page is turned.

A delicious story from a new voice in suspense, Lev AC Rosen's Lavender House is Knives Out with a queer historical twist.
Lavender House, 1952: the family seat of recently deceased matriarch Irene Lamontaine, head of the famous Lamontaine soap empire. Irene’s recipes for her signature scents are a well guarded secret—but it's not the only one behind these gates. This estate offers a unique freedom, where none of the residents or staff hide who they are. But to keep their secret, they've needed to keep others out. And now they're worried they're keeping a murderer in.
Irene’s widow hires Evander Mills to uncover the truth behind her mysterious death. Andy, recently fired from the San Francisco police after being caught in a raid on a gay bar, is happy to accept—his calendar is wide open. And his secret is the kind of secret the Lamontaines understand.
Andy had never imagined a world like Lavender House. He's seduced by the safety and freedom found behind its gates, where a queer family lives honestly and openly. But that honesty doesn't extend to everything, and he quickly finds himself a pawn in a family game of old money, subterfuge, and jealousy—and Irene’s death is only the beginning.
When your existence is a crime, everything you do is criminal, and the gates of Lavender House can’t lock out the real world forever. Running a soap empire can be a dirty business.

My Review:

When Evander “Andy” Mills meets Pearl Velez in a bar that’s just on the edge of seedy, they need each other – just not in any of the ways that one might expect at the opening of this dark, very noir-ish historical mystery.

Andy needs a purpose, and Pearl needs to give him one. Pearl needs an experienced detective that she can trust to investigate the recent death of her wife. And she knows that Andy is both experienced and trustworthy because he just got fired from the SFPD for being caught with his pants down, literally, in a police raid on a gay bar. His career is over. His life feels like it’s over, because all he’s been doing for the past 10 years is living his job and doing his best to keep his secrets. Now he has no secrets, no job, no apartment, no friends and nothing to fall back on.

He’s planning to throw himself off the Golden Gate Bridge once it gets dark enough – and once he gets drunk enough. At least that’s the plan until Pearl steps into his life with something that looks like it might BE purpose. And might give him the opportunity to help someone one more time.

Or hurt them worse than he ever imagined – depending on whether the case Pearl wants him to investigate turns out to really be a case. And depending, of course, on whodunnit.

So Pearl whisks Andy off to Lavender House, the beautiful home that the late soap magnate Irene Lamontaine and her wife Pearl created for themselves and their entirely queer family. A place where all of them can safely be themselves – as long as no one reveals their secret to the outside world.

Irene’s death might have been an accident. She might have lost her balance and fallen over the railing she was found under. But the fall wasn’t that far and Irene was healthy and energetic in spite of her years. The fall shouldn’t have killed her.

Between her family’s secrets and her family’s money there are plenty of motives for murder. It’s up to Andy to navigate the family’s murky relationships while not letting himself be seduced by living in the first place he’s ever known where he can finally be his authentic self.

Because Lavender House is a kind of paradise, and it’s up to Andy to find the snake in the garden.

Escape Rating A+: There are so many ways to approach this story, and all of them work. Frankly, the story just works. It had me from that opening scene in the bar and didn’t let go until the bittersweet end. To the point where, as much as I LOVED the audiobook, I read the last third as text because I simply had to find out how it ALL worked out.

I was pretty certain I knew whodunnit – and I did – but that wasn’t the most important part of the story. Still, I was glad to be vindicated.

But I did absolutely adore the narrator, Vikas Adam, whose performance definitely added the plus in that A+ Rating. I’ve fallen under his spell before, as he is one of the primary readers for Jenn Lyons’ Chorus of Dragons series, and he’s every bit as good here. To the point where I had to triple-check the credits for the audio. I expected him to do a terrific job with voicing Andy – and he certainly does – but he managed to not sound like himself AT ALL while voicing most of the female characters. I did that triple check because I kept thinking there was a female narrator working with him. But it was all him and it was fantastic.

The story is both a mystery and a heartbreaker, and the hard parts were that much harder to listen to because the narration was just so good.

Lavender House is being promoted as a gay Knives Out – and it certainly is that from the mystery perspective. (The comparison works even better now that it’s been revealed that private investigator Benoit Blanc is also gay.) At least on the surface, it seems as if the Lamontaine family is every bit as wealthy as the Thrombeys, and just as dysfunctional and eccentric. It’s just that the causes of some of the dysfunction at Lavender House can be laid directly at the feet of the 1950s and the circumstances they are forced to live under.

The mystery in Lavender House is fascinating, but it feels like the bleeding heart – sometimes literally – of this story is Andy’s journey. And in some ways the two parallel each other more than I expected.

At the heart of the murder – and at the heart of Andy’s journey, is a story about finding a purpose for one’s life. Andy begins at his lowest ebb because he’s just lost his and doesn’t know how to replace it. He’s lived for his job and now it’s turned on him because of an innate part of his being. Investigating Irene’s death gives him that purpose – even as it forces him to confront all the ways that he stifled himself in order to hang onto that job.

At the same time, all of the tensions at Lavender House, along with most of the motives and dysfunction, also have to do with purpose. For the staff, it’s a VERY safe place to work. But for the family it can sometimes be a gilded cage. Not because they can’t actually leave, but because they have to hide their real selves from the world when they do. And if they have no purpose within the house, as is true for two members of that family, they also have no way of making one outside it.

In the end, the solution to the mystery of Irene Lamontaine’s death was a catharsis but not a surprise. The case does come together just a bit suddenly at the end after a lot of often fruitless digging into scant clues and overabundant motives. But the investigation does hold the reader’s interest well, even when it delves into the angst in Andy’s head as much as it does the death that kicked things off.

But Andy’s journey from pretending to be ‘one of the boys’ at the cop shop through closed doors and literal beatings from his former colleagues to the realization that even if he can’t remain in the paradise of Lavender House that he can have a good and fulfilling life – if not always a totally free or completely safe one – as a gay man in 1950s San Francisco, with all the potential for pain and heartbreak and joy, is one that will haunt me for a long time.

Reviewer’s Note: Also that cover is just really, really cool. It’s almost like that damn dress that was either blue and black or white and gold. The more I look at it the more I see. Not just that it’s a silhouette, but there’s a face. And the rabbits. And eyes. So many facets – just like the story it represents.