Canary

Last in the delightfully funny Valentine and Lovelace series, Canary finds our two protagonists a bit the worse for wear. Lovelace’s bar, once the darling of Boston’s gay brigade, is losing money like crazy, largely because someone keeps insisting on leaving dead bodies around. Do that often enough, and people start to stay away. The cops—this IS the 1980s, after all—are not wildly interested in the gay community’s problems, so Lovelace and Clarisse set up shop as sleuths, determined to stop the killer before he puts them out of business. As always, the real action here is in the rapid-fire dialogue: Imagine The Thin Man…only set in the 1980s, in a world populated by drag queens and the women to whom they give make-up tips.