The Mortal Groove (Jane Lawless Series #15)

by Ellen Hart

Overview

Ellen Hart was named the 2017 MWA Grand Master, the most distinguished lifetime achievement award offered in the mystery community.

Ellen Hart's newest Lambda Award Finalist The Mortal Groove is a haunting and accomplished tale of dark secrets.

Minneapolis restaurateur and amateur sleuth Jane Lawless is in the middle of ringing in the New Year when the biggest financial backers in Minnesota politics break up the party with a backroom proposition for her father: How'd he like to be the state's next governor?

Flattered, Ray Lawless, a retired attorney, agrees to run, and the latecomer's sprint to the state capital is a huge success until reporters start digging. He and his family are fair game, but worse than that, so are the men running his campaign. Their secrets, involving the mysterious death of a young woman, have been buried since the summer they all came home from Vietnam. Unfortunately for Jane and her father, those secrets won't stay that way for long in Hart's ominous addition to her widely acclaimed mystery series.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780312377878
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	11/11/2008
Series:	Jane Lawless Series , #15
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	368
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

ELLEN HART, named the 2017 Mystery Writers of America’s Grandmaster, is the author of more than thirty mysteries, many of them featuring private investigator Jane Lawless. Entertainment Weekly has called her “a top novelist in the cultishly popular gay mystery genre.” She has won multiple Minnesota Book Awards, and has been nominated twenty-three times for the Lambda Literary Award, winning six. She lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, with her partner of forty years.

Read an Excerpt

The Mortal Groove

By Hart, Ellen St. Martin's Minotaur
Copyright © 2007
Hart, Ellen
All right reserved.

ISBN: 9780312349455

Prologue
Three young men in a northern Iowa field. They could be college kids home for the summer or farmhands taking a break on a hot August afternoon, but they aren’t. All three are outwardly good boys. They love their mothers. They don’t swear in front of children. They know how to behave appropriately. But one, though he still has the face of sweet youth, is a time bomb—a bomb that has gone off once already, and threatens to do so again.
Within the last four months, all of these boys, now men, have come home from a tour in Vietnam. One is standing, smoking a joint; the other two sit with their backs against the trunk of an oak. All are wearing battered boots, army field pants, and T-shirts. The one standing, Larry Wilton, is watching a crow perched at the top of the tree. The two men on the ground pass a fifth of rum between them.
“I am so totally stoked,” says the one called Larry. “The jury acquitted him. We’re all in the clear.”
Randy, the blond curly haired kid, the one who invited his two best buddies up to visit him on the vast, flat, Iowa prairie because he doesn’t feel comfortable around his old high school friends anymore, shakes his head. “We’ll never be in the clear.”
“Don’t be such a pessimist,” says Larry. “Your brother’s a free man and so are we. I think that calls for some fireworks.” He leans over, reaches into his duffel bag, and comes out with asemiautomatic pistol, a new purchase. He tells anyone who’s interested that he needs it because he just don’t feel right if he ain’t got no firepower. After a year in hell, a gun is as much a part of his body as his lungs. He fires several rounds into the air, then begins to dance his rendition of an Irish jig. He looks ridiculous and stoned, which he is.
Randy stares at him, takes another hit off the bottle, then hands it to Delavon. Delavon is a black man from Detroit. The biggest human being Randy had ever seen—before Vietnam. Randy believes that his life will forever be defined by two acronyms—B.N. and A.N. Before Nam and After Nam.
Larry lands on his knees in the dirt in front of Randy, grinning like a gargoyle. “Man, I love this life,” he says, taking a deep breath. “I purely do.”
“Nothin’ pure about us,” says Delavon.
“You guys fry me. We took care of business, right?”
With his eyes half lowered, Randy considers Larry’s hair. Each man’s hair is still short, not quite army issue, but Larry has been out the longest, so his has grown the most. Randy tries to decide what color it is. He comes to the conclusion that it has no color. It’s anticolor. Like dust.
“That cunt deserved to die,” says Larry.
Randy erupts at him, arm cocked, hand balled into a fist. He wants to annihilate him for saying that.
Delavon just watches from his position by the tree. He wishes he had a cigarette. When Larry and Randy have both rolled on their backs, grunting and sweating like hogs in a pen, Delavon, who fancies himself a preacher of sorts, offers his take on the matter.
“We gotta stop fighting like little kids, you understand me? We gotta become the brothers we always say we are. Like, maybe we do some serious voodoo shit. Cut our fingers and blend the blood in a cup. Or butcher ourselves a snake and swear an oath over it in a graveyard. ’Cause brothers, hear me well. If one of us ever talks, we be dead men.” 
Copyright © 2007 by Ellen Hart. All rights reserved.


Continues...

Excerpted from The Mortal Groove by Hart, Ellen Copyright © 2007 by Hart, Ellen. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Reading Group Guide

Minneapolis restaurateur Jane Lawless is ringing in the New Year when the biggest backers in Minnesota politics break up the party to ask her father if he would like to be governor.
Flattered, Ray Lawless decides to run, and the race is going great until reporters start digging up the dirt on him, his family, and the men running his campaign, whose secrets, involving the decades'-old death of a young woman, have been buried since Vietnam. Mortal Groove, the latest addition to Hart's multi-layered Jane Lawless series, is a haunting tale of dark secrets that is sure to satisfy.

1. In this mystery, Hart explores a theme of violence—how violent experience changes people. Discuss this theme in relation to both Peter Lawless and Randy Turk.

2. Early in the book, Randy talks about his loneliness as a boy and how the desire to connect with other guys his age set him on a path that he might have fled from if he'd understood where it would lead. How was loneliness complicit in Randy's demise?

3. Would you say that Larry Wilton was molded by his time in Vietnam, or do you think he would have been the same kind of man, regardless of his war-time experiences?

4. How do you think what happened to Peter in that travel trailer at the end of the book will change him?

5. Do you believe Peter was right to take Mia, or should he have left her in foster-care and tried another way to bring her home?

6. Was there redemption in this book? For any of the characters?

7. How do you think Peter's decision to take Mia will effect his future with his wife?

8. Jane is appalled by what Peter does to Larry Wilton. Do you think she should forgive him? Forget? Turn Peter into the police? How will this alter their relationship?

9. Peter is a damaged soul, looking for a way to be a hero. Larry Wilton is considered a hero by his friends because he saved their lives many times over. What is a true hero? Do we use that term too easily today?

10. In this story, some cracks begin to appear in Jane's relationship with Kenzie. Do you think they are a good match?

11. Many of the characters in this book are keeping secrets. Can you name some of them? Is not telling something you know the same as a lie?

12. In chapter sixteen Randy sweats his way through a difficult conversation with his daughter, Katie. "Randy was having a hard time looking at her. In a flash, it came to him. He was afraid of her, of her judgement. He felt suddenly old — an old man sensing how impossible it was to reduce the truth of his life to something simple enough to satisfy a child." Have you ever felt that way?

13. Hart touches on race tensions during the Vietnam era. Did her portrayal seem realistic?

14. Hart's books have been called "Cozies with a Brain." Where would you place this novel within the context of mystery fiction? Cozy/traditional? Hard-boiled? Soft-boiled?

Recipe

Minneapolis restaurateur and amateur sleuth Jane Lawless is in the middle of ringing in the New Year the best way she knows how—with her family, friends, and some excellent champagne—when the biggest financial backers in Minnesota politics break up the party with a little backroom proposition for her father: How’d he like to be the state’s next governor?

Flattered, Ray Lawless, a retired defense attorney, agrees to run, and the latecomer’s sprint to the state capital is going great until reporters and opponents start digging up the kind of dirt that is more valuable than gold out on the campaign trail. He and his family are fair game, but worse than that, so are the men running his campaign. Their secrets, involving the mysterious death of a young woman, have been buried since the summer they all came home from Vietnam. Unfortunately for Jane and her father, those secrets won’t stay that way for long.

The Mortal Groove, the newest addition to Lambda and Minnesota Book Award--winning author Ellen Hart’s multilayered Jane Lawless series, is a haunting tale of dark secrets that is sure to satisfy.

Editorial Reviews

Engrossing . . . Excellent election-year reading.” —Publishers Weekly

“Hart offers another solid entry in her entertaining Jane Lawless mystery series… Loyalty, fairness, and the law are compellingly probed in this increasingly thoughtful series.” —Booklist on The Mortal Groove

“Hart is at the top of her game.” —Curve Magazine on The Mortal Groove

“Pitting sib against sib in a deadly game, the fourteenth Lawless mystery gets highly dramatic.” —Booklist on Night Vision

“Jane Lawless and her trusty sidekick, Cordelia Thorn, are the most refreshing, entertaining, and cerebrally stimulating duo since Rex Stout's unbeatable combo of Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin.” —Baltimore Alternative

From the Publisher

Her father's gubernatorial campaign spells trouble for a gay restaurateur and her flamboyant best friend. When politically connected lawyer Randall Turk convinced Ray Lawless to accept the Democratic nomination for governor of Minnesota, Ray knew it would mean long hours and hard work. He didn't know he'd be putting his family in mortal danger. But when reporter Melanie Gunderson, who's just reconnected with her ex-girlfriend Cordelia Thorn, is knifed outside the Unicorn Bar, Cordelia shakes out her rainbow-hued locks, grabs her best friend Jane Lawless (Night Vision, 2006, etc.) and drives down to Waldo, Iowa, to finish Melanie's investigation into the murder of Susan Bouchard-a murder of which Randy's brother Ethan was acquitted nearly 30 years ago. Aided by Ray's campaign manager Del Green and drifter Larry Wilton, who served in Vietnam with Randy and Del, Randy desperately tries to hide every bit of dirt Jane and Cordelia can dig up. Ray's son Peter-who only wants to trace the daughter his wife Sigrid gave up for adoption years ago-gets caught in the crossfire when he loses his broadcasting job and takes a position with the campaign. Gutsy, practical Jane uses the skills that have made her Twin Cities eateries a success to track down a criminal who's cheated justice too long. Hart swings wildly from farce to thriller in this densely plotted family saga that pulls out perhaps one stop too many.

Kirkus Reviews