This is the first in Scoppettone's Lauren Laurano mystery series. Lauren is a lesbian private detective working in New York City, who becomes deeply obsessed with the cases she's working on. She is driven to unravel the mystery, but doesn't stop at who commited a crime -- she also must know why.

The crime revolves around a brutal rape of a young woman named Lake Huron. Lauren delves into the lives of Lake's family memebers, and discovers a complex, twisted and deeply American story of love, betrayal and psychosis. Unfortunately, this isn't what I would call a fair mystery. Lauren uncovers "who did it" through an intuitive leap. However, I have high hopes for later books in the series.

I liked Lauren. She is strong, intelligent and self-reliant, and unlike so many of the lesbian PI mysteries, she has a long-term relationship with a committed partner. The descriptions of their daily lives are realistic without being boring, and Lauren's friends are fascinating. I plan to read more of the series simply to read more about Lauren.

There were two problems with the prose that caused me to rate this book a 0 rather than a . The first is an over-use of exclamation points. They are everywhere in this book, usually when Laren is thinking about something, and I found them distracting. The second is a repetition of the phrase "What would X do?" where X is another fictional female PI or detective (Kinsey Millhone, V.I. Warshawski, and several others I didn't recognize). This was cute at first, but it got old. I hope I don't encounter it in later books.

Overall, it was an engaging and satisfying book.