Hall of Mirrors (A Judy Nightingale and Philippa Watson Mystery)
On the first of May, 1954, Lionel Kane watches helplessly as firefighters hurry past him to extinguish flames bursting from the doors and windows of the apartment he shares with his lover, Roger Raymond. Next to him in the street are two friends, Judy Nightingale and Philippa Watson, who now worry they all may be endangered by their efforts to resolve the years-long mystery surrounding a series of murders of young girls in the DC area and bring to justice the man they suspect of killing them—Adrian Bogdan, a man with powerful connections in government.
Hall of Mirrors is the second in Copenhaver’s Nightingale trilogy. The first of the series, The Savage Kind, gained high praise for its focus on an often-underrepresented class of characters—teenage girls and their sexual awakening. The book won the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Mystery.
In Hall of Mirrors, Copenhaver further develops the characters of the young women and their complex and deepening connections, introduces and explores the complicated mixed-race relationship between the two gay men, and adds layers of historical context—the time of the Lavender Scare, when anti-communists in the U.S. Senate and the FBI labeled homosexuals as dangerous risks to national security.
Written as first-person entries, the narrative illuminates as it delves into the thoughts and feelings of the characters. The plot is difficult to follow, however, as the timeline jumps back and forth from May 1954 to various times in 1949, 1952, and 1953, and the story is told from different characters’ perspectives. This reader, at least, got lost in a hall of mirrors.
