A New Book!

Oh yeah, amid everything else I forgot to mention my new book, Essential Blue, out on August 16 from primo lesbian press Bywater Books. It’s the third Blue McCarron mystery, which I guess establishes Blue as a series protag. She won’t care since she’s distracted by a career change, an inappropriate crush and a move I wrote for her before I realized that nobody can move in one morning! And of course she’s tasked with solving a particularly unpleasant crime wreaking havoc on the college campus where she’s teaching as a result of her Doberman’s allergy to an east coast fungus. Blue is a mess but determined to shape up if everything around her would just slow down. It won’t.

EB was fun to write and as complicated as is my wont. I can’t imagine that any reader will instantly guess or even care which Mexican pop diva is the inspiration for the mysterious character, Chimi, but hey, the clue is on page 27. This is what I mean by “fun,” the weaving of real-life threads into a fictional world. The politically aware among my readers, however, are sure to recognize the inspiration of a very scary supreme court justice in the unfolding plot. Note that these real-life figures are merely vaguely inspirational and any resemblance to them in reality is a fanciful imposition, a sort of dream, not there at all. Just fun. Right?

EB belongs to the academic mystery genre (see this great article and some classic titles - https://crimereads.com/a-brief-history-of-academic-mysteries-campus-thrillers-and-research-noir/) and Blue will stay there if I write sequels because I love Dorothy Sayers and Amanda Cross (pseudonym of Carolyn Heilbrun), both of whom now live on only in their books, which tells you how old I am. The academic mystery is a discrete genre with an impressive history and internal rules I didn’t follow impeccably in this transition for Blue, but I think it meets expectations.

Blue teaches social psychology, a subset of sociology and the discipline of my “All But Dissertation,” never-finished post-master’s doctoral at Washington University in St. Louis, so it’s okay for Blue to teach it.  Protags in academic mysteries tend to teach literature or the classics, but if ever there were a time for social psych analyses of U.S. culture, it’s now! Still, let me know if Blue gets at all pedantic and ponderous with it, which she’d hate.

A theme in EB involves the near-universal U.S. ignorance and dismissal of multiple complex Mexican, Central and South American cultures that predate ours by centuries and continue to exist in the cultural identities of millions who speak, but are not, Spanish. My own epic ignorance was pointed out to me at a dinner party by a Professor of Spanish who has asked not to be named, so thanks to anónima for sending me to my computer that same night to start writing Essential Blue.

Check out the spectacular cover by Bywater’s Ann McMan, also the author of my all-time favorite lesbian novel, Beowulf for Cretins. And here are the Bywater and Amazon purchase links –

https://www.bywaterbooks.com/product/ultimate-blue-by-abigail-padgett/

https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Blue-McCarron-Mystery/