Elizabeth Sims

Aspiring actress and single mom Rita Farmer has gone from struggling to find work to downright desperate. If she doesn’t land a paying job soon—horror movie, soap commercial, anything—she’s afraid her ex-husband will use her dire financial straits to take away Petey, her cherished four-year-old son. While she's charming the crowd at storytime at the L.A. library, a celebrity defense attorney approaches her with an unusual job offer: So long as she’s discreet, Rita can rake in $1,000 a day preparing his client for her appearance in court. Easy money? Hardly. His client, Eileen Tenaway, is not only a wealthy heiress and a queen of the tabloids but she’s been charged with the murder of her own child. The attorney needs Rita to coach Eileen secretly to help her seem more sympathetic, more human. He needs the jury to believe not only her words, but the subtle cues of body language, facial expressions, even vocal style. Rita knows she can do it, but what she doesn’t know is how determined she’ll become to find out what really happened to Eileen’s child that night. Her life, and Petey's, will depend on it.

Studying to be a lawyer, Rita takes dreggy acting jobs to pay the bills. Dressed in police uniform as an extra on a movie shoot, she wanders into a rough part of town only to be pulled into a vicious assault. Rita chases off the men but the boy they attacked isn’t out of danger yet. Rita’s heart goes out to him and his grandmother Amaryllis B. Cubitt, the director of an urban mission that Rita had turned to for help years ago. But the mission has changed from its unassuming past, and is now flush with private donations and gruff guards posted at the doors. Rita can’t help but wonder if now Amaryllis is too proud to ask for the help she needs.

This book won a Lambda Literary Award. After her narrow brush with death in Holy Hell, you'd think Lillian Byrd would have learned to keep her head down, but when a friend in crisis calls from California, Lillian jumps on a plane and wings her way from Detroit to Palm Springs—and danger. It's the long weekend of the Dinah Shore golf tournament, the wildest women's sporting event in the world, when thousands of lesbians descend on the desert community of Rancho Mirage and take over. At a pre-championship party, Lillian leaps into a slippery romance with a top LPGA star. But her superstar athlete has a secret: Someone is quietly terrorizing her. Lillian, eager to help, goes undercover as a high-profile reporter, an unhinged nun, and a professional caddie while uncovering layer after disturbing layer of the golfer’s past. Finally, with violence erupting at every turn, Lillian uncovers her lover's ultimate horrifying secret—and it is not at all what she had guessed.