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Blind Eye #1
Blind Curves
The murdered body of lesbian publisher Rosemary Finney is found on a remote hiking path south of San Francisco. Local police of the wealthy Woodside enclave quickly focus on a prime Investigative Reporter Velvet Erickson. Velvet appeals to her friend and former lover―private eye Yoshi Yakamota, whose detective skills more than make up for her failing eyesight―for help. Yoshi dedicates the resources of her firm, Blind Eye Detective Agency, to proving her friend’s innocence. But every time the investigators rule out one suspect, another takes their place. What has Rosemary Finney done to make so many enemies? And which one did it?
259 pages, Paperback
First published March 12, 2007
5 people are currently reading
62 people want to read
About the author
Diane Anderson-Minshall
8 books5 followersDiane Anderson-Minshall is the executive editor of Curve magazine, the country's best-selling lesbian magazine. The co-founder & former executive editor of Girlfriends magazine and the co-founder & former editor/publisher of Alice magazine, Anderson-Minshall's writing-which focuses primarily on lesbian life, popular culture, travel, entertainment and celebrities-has appeared in dozens of magazines including Passport, Film Threat, Utne Reader, Wine X, India Currents, Teenage, Bitch, Seventeen, American Forests, Femme Fatale, Diva, The Advocate, Fabula, Bust, Natural Health, Venus, and numerous newspapers.
Her essays have also appeared in several anthologies including Reading The L Word: Outing Contemporary Television; Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine; Body Outlaws; Closer to Home: Bisexuality and Feminism; Young Wives Tales: New Adventures in Love and Partnership; 50 Ways to Support Gay & Lesbian Equality; and Tough Girls. Anderson-Minshall is the co-editor of the anthology Becoming: Young Ideas on Gender, Race and Sexuality and co-author of the upcoming Blind Eye mystery series. Diane was recently named one of PowerUp's 2006 Top Ten Amazing Women in Showbiz, for her work with lesbian filmmakers.
Her essays have also appeared in several anthologies including Reading The L Word: Outing Contemporary Television; Bitchfest: Ten Years of Cultural Criticism from the Pages of Bitch Magazine; Body Outlaws; Closer to Home: Bisexuality and Feminism; Young Wives Tales: New Adventures in Love and Partnership; 50 Ways to Support Gay & Lesbian Equality; and Tough Girls. Anderson-Minshall is the co-editor of the anthology Becoming: Young Ideas on Gender, Race and Sexuality and co-author of the upcoming Blind Eye mystery series. Diane was recently named one of PowerUp's 2006 Top Ten Amazing Women in Showbiz, for her work with lesbian filmmakers.
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
August 6, 2021
1 star
I stopped around 15%
Frankly, the writing style reminded me of fanfiction (descriptors repeated themselves constantly: "the butch", "the femme", "the Japanese woman"; not a large variety in the vocabulary, especially the verbs; either ridiculously long and complicated sentences or stupidly short ones; ...) and while I agree that there is something about the butch/femme characteristics, the characters should have a personality beyond that. And no, being blind is not a personality trait.
Also a lot of the descriptors felt like someone took a Thesaurus, pinned it to a wall and played darts.
Example that doesn't spoil any of the plot: "...but loggers considered the species an inferior lumber and declared them unmarketable, which gave the weed trees further rein on the forest."
It may be just me but it sounds stupid and pretentious as hell. Also it was almost completely irrelevant.
If it was 2007 and this was an fanfic on fanfiction.net it may not be as bad, but it's a published book and it's 2021.
I stopped around 15%
Frankly, the writing style reminded me of fanfiction (descriptors repeated themselves constantly: "the butch", "the femme", "the Japanese woman"; not a large variety in the vocabulary, especially the verbs; either ridiculously long and complicated sentences or stupidly short ones; ...) and while I agree that there is something about the butch/femme characteristics, the characters should have a personality beyond that. And no, being blind is not a personality trait.
Also a lot of the descriptors felt like someone took a Thesaurus, pinned it to a wall and played darts.
Example that doesn't spoil any of the plot: "...but loggers considered the species an inferior lumber and declared them unmarketable, which gave the weed trees further rein on the forest."
It may be just me but it sounds stupid and pretentious as hell. Also it was almost completely irrelevant.
If it was 2007 and this was an fanfic on fanfiction.net it may not be as bad, but it's a published book and it's 2021.
April 16, 2019
Oh boy. This book did NOT age well. It refers to characters as "the femme" and "the butch", clearly written at the height of the L Word when those terms were already on their last legs. Tasteless descriptions like "nubile" and "mammoth breasts" are drizzled generously throughout as well. The characters seem more like walking stereotypes than actual people.
Is "woman found murdered in park" a genre? It should be a genre. Half the characters seem to have been located at the rather remote murder site at the same time, adding to the mystery of what the authors were thinking when writing this book.
Is "woman found murdered in park" a genre? It should be a genre. Half the characters seem to have been located at the rather remote murder site at the same time, adding to the mystery of what the authors were thinking when writing this book.
April 25, 2019
Mostly I found this a little disappointing, but it ended well, and worth persevering with.
June 19, 2020
3.75 stars
It was great - I'll write more words about it when I have a little more time.
Sorry!
It was great - I'll write more words about it when I have a little more time.
Sorry!
Read
June 19, 2020The Blind Eye Detective Agency was formed with the philosophies that 1. eyewitnesses are not to be trusted and 2. one should use all one’s senses to detect crime. Despite this, the three Blind Eye detectives—Yoshi Matsumota, the blind, lesbian owner, Bud Williams, Yoshi’s assistant, whose lower-body paralysis requires him to use a wheelchair, and Tucker Shade, lesbian detective-in-training—spend a good portion of the book interviewing eyewitnesses. And of course this is what PIs do. To be fair, though, Yoshi discovers a good bit of information by smelling, touching, and hearing.
It seems that Rosemary Finney, the owner of one of the largest lesbian magazines, has been murdered and Yoshi’s best friend (and former lover) Velvet Erickson, is suspected to doing the dirty deed. So Yoshi looses her minions to find the real killer. The trouble is, almost everyone who ever knew Rosemary—many of whom have slept with her—hate her.
There is good reason for this, because Rosemary is painted in the most awful colors imaginable, making it impossible for the reader to have any sympathy with her at all. She harasses her employees, drops her lovers, hits a police officer, and even yells at a judge in court. I guess there is nothing wrong with this from a writing point of view because it gives the book more suspects, and if this were the only example of easy writing, I wouldn’t quibble, but several of their main characters seem to be almost caricatures of types. Bud Williams is so bitter about his injury and about having to work for a woman that almost everything that spews out of his mouth or his mind is a negative cliché; AJ Jackson’s black dialect would be fine if she were talking to someone in her own hood, but not to strangers, and certainly not in her inner musings. Even Yoshi—despite having lived at least most of her life in the U.S.—talks in a very stilted and formal manner. You’ll find no contractions in her speech.
Yes, there is some good writing here too, such as the phrase “Blind Eye’s round wall clock held its hands straight up like a robbery victim.” Unfortunately, the good writing is sandwiched inside phrases like “Tucker shuddered at the recollection” or ”Steam rose from between her thighs.” Really?
Tucker Shade and Velvet Erickson, despite their names, are the most sympathetic characters; the most normal. Luckily, the book is segmented in such a way that we see all of the characters from their own third-person point of view. In fact, I am not sure who is the protagonist here—Tucker, Velvet, Yoshi, Bud, and even AJ seem to get equal time. So if some of these characters are not done as well as others, at least we get to see them in depth.
If this book has any importance, it is because Yoshi and Bud and “differently abled,” and often turn their handicap to their own advantage, as when Yoshi uses her enhanced senses to overhear conversations that were not meant for her ears. Yoshi thinks, “Was it wrong to prey upon people’s guilt and sympathy for the disabled in order to get information? Not if it worked.”
All in all, it is a fairly well-crafted mystery with more than a few bits of interest here and there. I’ll give it a 3, which here means that it was not badly done, but not on my list of recommendations.
Note: I read the first Bold Strokes printing of this novel.
Another Note: This review is included in my book The Art of the Lesbian Mystery Novel, along with information on over 930 other lesbian mysteries by over 310 authors.
It seems that Rosemary Finney, the owner of one of the largest lesbian magazines, has been murdered and Yoshi’s best friend (and former lover) Velvet Erickson, is suspected to doing the dirty deed. So Yoshi looses her minions to find the real killer. The trouble is, almost everyone who ever knew Rosemary—many of whom have slept with her—hate her.
There is good reason for this, because Rosemary is painted in the most awful colors imaginable, making it impossible for the reader to have any sympathy with her at all. She harasses her employees, drops her lovers, hits a police officer, and even yells at a judge in court. I guess there is nothing wrong with this from a writing point of view because it gives the book more suspects, and if this were the only example of easy writing, I wouldn’t quibble, but several of their main characters seem to be almost caricatures of types. Bud Williams is so bitter about his injury and about having to work for a woman that almost everything that spews out of his mouth or his mind is a negative cliché; AJ Jackson’s black dialect would be fine if she were talking to someone in her own hood, but not to strangers, and certainly not in her inner musings. Even Yoshi—despite having lived at least most of her life in the U.S.—talks in a very stilted and formal manner. You’ll find no contractions in her speech.
Yes, there is some good writing here too, such as the phrase “Blind Eye’s round wall clock held its hands straight up like a robbery victim.” Unfortunately, the good writing is sandwiched inside phrases like “Tucker shuddered at the recollection” or ”Steam rose from between her thighs.” Really?
Tucker Shade and Velvet Erickson, despite their names, are the most sympathetic characters; the most normal. Luckily, the book is segmented in such a way that we see all of the characters from their own third-person point of view. In fact, I am not sure who is the protagonist here—Tucker, Velvet, Yoshi, Bud, and even AJ seem to get equal time. So if some of these characters are not done as well as others, at least we get to see them in depth.
If this book has any importance, it is because Yoshi and Bud and “differently abled,” and often turn their handicap to their own advantage, as when Yoshi uses her enhanced senses to overhear conversations that were not meant for her ears. Yoshi thinks, “Was it wrong to prey upon people’s guilt and sympathy for the disabled in order to get information? Not if it worked.”
All in all, it is a fairly well-crafted mystery with more than a few bits of interest here and there. I’ll give it a 3, which here means that it was not badly done, but not on my list of recommendations.
Note: I read the first Bold Strokes printing of this novel.
Another Note: This review is included in my book The Art of the Lesbian Mystery Novel, along with information on over 930 other lesbian mysteries by over 310 authors.
May 19, 2009
I'm so glad I finished this before the three-day weekend and didn't waste my precious little holiday reading time on this seriously thought-terminating cliché of a lesbian detective novel. One might think that it is possible to do kitschy in an entertaining way without insulting the audience but here the novelists failed to do so and ended the unengaged drama so predictably that I felt insulted on behalf of all future and current lesbian detective readers and lesbians everywhere. There was less mystery to this dyke drama and more obvious stereotypes being fulfilled in paperback form.
August 3, 2016
Not bad for a first write out on a lesbian detective novel. Overall I have to agree that there was too much exposition and not enough action - a common problem with first novels and not enough of an issue to make me out the book down. I am going to try more in the series to see if pacing picks up and editing improves as the core character has great potential. (There were times the writing lots me in terms of POV and transitions, so be prepared to edit as you read and move on to the next chapter.) Have just bought book 2 in the series and will keep you posted.
July 5, 2014
2 1/2 stars really; I rounded up because I'll probably read more in this series. It interested me enough to continue despite some annoying aspects, mainly too much exposition and not enough action. Maybe as we get to know the setting and characters more it will be better. Fun read though.
March 13, 2012
Nice detective story with lots of plot curves.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews