This month, we’re reading John Copenhaver’s The Savage Kind, winner of the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for 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 the city streets, but creeping out from a murderous impulse of their own.

About the Book Club

NWA Equality’s Reading Between the Lines LGBTQ book club typically meets on the fourth Tuesday of each month from 6:30-7:30 p.m. at rotating locations in Benton and Washington Counties. Reading selections include a variety of cross-cultural and Queer subjects and works by LGBTQ authors. The book club is open to LGBTQ individuals and our allies, 18 and older. Please fill out a one-time registration here.

Books are available through our local program partners Pearl’s Books in Fayetteville and Two Friends Book Shop in Bentonville. Follow us on social media to win free books courtesy of program sponsor Tyson Foods.