A lesbian detective may seem an obvious twist on the renchcoat-wearing outsider of classic hard-boiled detective fiction. But a dyke detective isn’t just a social outcast who fits the role and catches the crook. Jackie Manthorne and Eve Zaremba use this conservative genre to create worlds where dykes are the moral arbiters, and murder is comfort food. Though both authors use post-menopausal lesbian detectives, the similarity ends there.

Sudden Death is the fifth book in Manthorne’s Harriet Hubbley mystery series. Harriet, Harry to her friends, is an insatiably curious phys-ed teacher. Her habit of finding murder wherever she goes and her sleuthing technique of lucky guesses and coincidence make Harriet an amusing lesbian fusion of Jessica Fletcher and Nancy Drew.

Set in downtown Montreal, Sudden Death has Harry attend a teaching conference that reunites her with classmates from McGill University. The reunion of this small and inbred community of friends is rife with the soap-opera politics of jilted ex-lovers. When Harriet discovers the body of an old classmate outside a downtown bar, she is forced to make sense of who has slept with whom and suspects even her closest friends of murder.

Manthorne fans will recognize the plot from Fatal Reunion, the second book in the series, in which a high school friend is killed at a reunion in the Maritimes. However, instead of Harry musing about her (now ex-) lover Judy, this time the subplot revolves around Harriet’s new girlfriend. Raven is half Harry’s age and conveniently shows up from San Francisco to provide distraction from the main narrative. As always, Manthorne advocates safer sex and Harriet pulls out dental dams and latex gloves. The narrator claims the sex is exciting, but no corroborating evidence is provided.

The full scenic descriptions of the earlier books are missing and Manthorne relies heavily on Montreal street names to provide setting. She also underestimates her readers by providing immediate and unnecessary translations for simple French phrases, as when a friend asks, “Hey, cherie, que fais-tu? What are you doing?” or “‘Harry, comment ça va?’ Isabelle asked. ‘How are you?’”

Manthorne shies away from the action and suspense of Harriet’s showdown with the murderer by glossing over the scene too quickly, then briefly encapsulating it in memory to fill the reader in on what was left out. Nonetheless, fans of Harriet will enjoy having another chance to spend time with this soft-boiled Sapphic sleuth.

In White Noise, Eve Zaremba provides her fans with the final appearance of Helen Keremos, a character she introduced in 1972. Helen’s lesbianism is placed firmly in the foreground, but is virtually irrelevant to the plot. This combination gives the novel wide appeal and spotlights a lesbian character without sacrificing suspense to didactic politics.

Helen is a 60-year-old, hard-edged dyke, a meticulous private detective who works out of Vancouver. She is a woman who knows she can’t plan for the unexpected. When Sonny, a former client from Hong Kong, calls her from a Vancouver hotel, Helen agrees to pick him up. But before Sonny makes it to her car, he is thrown into a van by two men. Helen quickly foils the kidnapping attempt, but is dragged into a complicated web of crime. Sonny is not telling the whole truth, and Helen must protect her friends and herself while investigating Sonny’s claims and the mystery at hand.

Zaremba uses characters from the previous Helen Keremos novel, The Butterfly Effect, without boring loyal readers or confusing new ones. The voice is consistent and Zaremba has a knack for knowing when to pick up the pace and when to let events unfold slowly. Although there are some tired clichés and events that surprise only the characters, those lapses are usually tucked into fast-paced scenes where they are easily forgiven. This book is a quick read. It holds no surprises in form, but supplies all the required action, tension, and restoration of order that detective fiction readers demand.

The weakest link in White Noise is the way in which Helen’s career is ended. Zaremba ties up the novel – and Helen’s investigative career – with a trite and unbelievable postscript. The saving grace of her farewell epilogue is that the ends are tied so loosely. Perhaps, if Zaremba’s readers are lucky, the knot will unravel and Helen Keremos will have one more case.