The Always Anonymous Beast

Meet Caitlin Reece. Smart, cool, tough. A dropout from conventional life. Highly competent in her chosen profession. She has no office, obtains clients by referral only, and never leaves her home without her .357 Magnum Smith and Wesson.

Val Frazier, Victoria's star TV anchorwoman, is Caitlin's newest client. She is the victim of a viciously homophobic blackmailer who has discovered her relationship with Tonia Konig.

Tonia is a lesbian-feminist professor, an outspoken, passiontely committed proponent of nonviolence. She is enraged by her own helplessness, she is outraged by Caitlin's challenge to her most fundamental beliefs, and by Caitlin herself, whom she considers a "a thug".

As Caitlin stalks the blackmailer and his accomplices through the byways of the city of Victoria, she uncovers ever darker layers of danger surrounding Tonia. And she struggles against a new and altogether unwanted complication: she is increasingly attracted to the woman who despises her.

The Always Anonymous Beast marks two auspicious debuts: Laren Wright Douglas, a most talented and exciting writer: and Caitlin Reece - intelligent, complex, sharply humorous - one of the most intriguing women ever to appear in mystery fiction.

Originally published by Naiad Press 1987.