Who better to write a mystery about a transgender woman with identity issues than a transgender woman with identity issues? Jennifer Finney Boylan has designed LONG BLACK VEIL (Crown, $25) as a whodunit — an existential whodunit about living with all your selves. The story opens in 1980 at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, a “medieval-looking” pile, long abandoned and thus a tempting destination for some college friends looking for an adventure. The fun wears thin when someone locks them in and ceases altogether when they realize one of them is missing. To the author, the prison is more than a setting, it’s also a powerful symbol for the closeted life she once led.
There are two transgender characters in this novel, and one of them can save an old friend from suspicion of murder when the body of that missing student is found years later, in 2015. But in order to do so, she’ll have to acknowledge the closely guarded secret of her past life, a revelation she fears will alienate her husband and destroy her marriage. Although Boylan’s awkward handling of the two time frames depletes the tension, she has a good grip on the dynamics of her narrator’s current and past selves and the battle to keep them from fighting to the death.
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