The Savage Kind

A Mystery

By: John Copenhaver

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Hardcover | 5 October 2021

At a Glance

Hardcover
352 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
22.86 x 15.24 x 3.81

Hardcover

RRP $45.00

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2022 Lambda Literary Award WINNER in LGBTQ Mystery

Two lonely teenage girls in 1940s Washington, DC, discover they have a penchant for solving crimes—and an even greater desire to commit them—in the new mystery novel by Macavity Award-winning novelist John Copenhaver.

Philippa Watson, a good-natured yet troubled seventeen-year-old, has just moved to Washington, DC. She’s lonely until she meets Judy Peabody, a brilliant and tempestuous classmate. The girls become unlikely friends and fashion themselves as intellectuals, drawing the notice of Christine Martins, their dazzling English teacher, who enthralls them with her passion for literature and her love of noirish detective fiction.

When Philippa returns a novel Miss Martins has lent her, she interrupts a man grappling with her in the shadows. Frightened, Philippa flees, unsure who the man is or what she’s seen. Days later, her teacher returns to school altered: a dark shell of herself. On the heels of her teacher’s transformation, a classmate is found dead in the Anacostia River—murdered—the body stripped and defiled with a mysterious inscription.

As the girls follow the clues and wrestle with newfound feelings toward each other, they suspect that the killer is closer to their circle than they imagined—and that the greatest threat they face may not be lurking in the halls at school, or in the city streets, but creeping out from a murderous impulse of their own.

Industry Reviews

"Philippa Watson and Judy Peabody, the nervy teenage duo at the center of John Copenhaver’s delicious trilogy opener The Savage Kind, each bring loneliness to a friendship that burns with intensity from the get-go. Their fascination — or is it obsession? — with each other, and with crime, begins after the death of a fellow student and the disappearance of a beloved pulp-fiction-loving teacher. To expose the darkness and rot beneath his tale, Copenhaver peppers it with literary allusions — Greek tragedy abounds, as do allusions to Wuthering Heights, classic poetry and contemporary detective fiction. But this 1940s noir homage would not succeed if it weren’t for Judy and Philippa’s chemistry, which promises to deepen — and perhaps combust — over two more books."

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