CHICKEN RUN

Even though Letitia Campbell’s latest lover, sleek Julia Rossi, chose her job at Classic Cars over the arcadian pleasures of life at the chicken farm that Letty inherited from her aunt, Letty’s willing to let Julia inveigle her into renting out a couple of fallow acres for an auction of stratospherically-priced autos. Apart from the prominence of women (the dominant male character is Letty’s squawky rooster Erik), most of them lesbian—from mobile librarian Anne Marple to copper Emma Auckland—the ensuing story has one thing in common with Nancy Drew’s adventures: Even though its advertising, coupled with a few telltale signs—a quiet break-in, a dead chicken, the suspicious behavior of Julia’s married lust-object Simone Steigel, Simone’s receptionist, and vintage Mercedes owner Leisel Hopmann—suggests that there’s dirty business afoot, no crimes are committed till the final scene, though Letty does find an enthusiastic new lover long before then. Readers scared off by the butch heroics of New Victoria’s backlist can take comfort in Fritchley’s first, a gentle lesbian love story with only a kiss of slow-burning mystery.