I want to recommend two fantastic books that I read last year. Neither can really be categorized as LGBTQ fiction, both being aimed at the mainstream market. Both could probably be loosely categorized as literary crime or mystery fiction.
You probably heard about the film Winter's Bone that came out in 2010. I haven't seen the movie, but I have read the book it's based on. WINTER'S BONE by Daniel Woodrell. It's amazing.Very sparse, very grim. Ree may be one of the toughest characters I've ever read about. There's just a touch of lesbian subtext in the book that made it resonate even more with me.
BY BLOOD by Ellen Ullman is difficult to summarize, so I will quote the copy from amazon.com:
San Francisco, the 1970s. A disgraced professor takes an office in an old downtown building to plot his return. But he is distracted by the sounds coming from the next room, the office of a psychiatrist. He overhears the therapy sessions of a young lesbian who is in search of her adoptive family. Enraptured by the sound of her voice and obsessed with her story, the professor takes up the patient’s quest as his own and discovers the disturbing truth about her origins. As he sends each new revelation to the patient---disguised as correspondence from an adoption agency---she is energized by the information, but finds herself unmoored from everything she thought she knew about herself.
Trust me, that description doesn't do the book justice. It's disturbing, fascinating, occasionally very funny. I always appreciate reading a novel where gay characters exist, but their gayness isn't the point. I don't know if I would call this a crime novel, but there's an undercurrent of darkness within the whole novel that is both compelling and disturbing.
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