The Hangdog Hustle: A Nell Fury Mystery - Softcover

In her third case following The Two-Bit Tango, lesbian San Francisco PI Nell Fury is hired to look into the last days of stabbing victim Kent Kishida. She first suspects he was killed because he was a gay man working at the Presidio, army land on the city's northern edge. His death occurred a few days before the fatal beating of a gay sailor at a Japanese naval base, but differences between the cases bother Nell: Kent was of Japanese ancestry, and he was a civilian employee of the Army, not Navy. As she begins to poke around the Presidio, which is on the verge of being transformed from a military base into a federal park, she discovers Kent's participation in a neighborhood coalition concerned with toxic waste cleanup at the base. Although the police, having all but dropped the case, think his part in the activist group has no bearing on his murder, Nell refuses to discount it as a lead. With dogged determination, she pursues the truth more dispassionately than either the police or gay friends, who are both more than willing to jump to conclusions. Pincus's Nell makes a fine complicated figure: not only does she manage to balance her emotion and her reason here, but she continues to juggle job, love life and responsibilities as absentee mother.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Lesbian sleuth Nell Fury returns in a tale of unsolved murder, radical rightists and leftists, cover-ups, and deception. Young Kent Kishida's body is found in San Francisco's Castro district, where he lived. But the police fail to find the victim's wallet, the murder weapon, or a suspect. Thereafter, Fury must sort out grains of fact from the mountains of speculation as to whether the killing resulted from gay bashing, racist assault, a lovers' quarrel, or random violence. A twisting trail of investigation takes Fury to the Presidio, the lush tract of U.S. Army^-owned land--rumored to be environmentally hazardous despite official denials--on which Kishida worked as a civilian employee of the military. When an associate is murdered and Fury is mugged and her new office ransacked, the convoluted plot picks up pace, speeding us across the country. Although Fury finds temporary erotic solace in a stranger's arms, the dauntless detective yearns throughout for Tammy Rae Tinkers, her not-quite-lost love, who has relocated to Memphis. Whitney Scott