A Secret Woman
Description
A tautly plotted trans-centric mystery novel by the author of Doom Patrol and Godmother Night.
By day, Simon Goldtree is an incorruptible homicide detective, clearing up impossible crimes while maintaining a wall of absolute secrecy around his personal life. But when the case of a murdered insurance executive draws Simon into a web of corporate intrigue, that wall starts to crack, forcing Simon on a strange journey into his own secret desires—as well as a future that feels more dangerous than any investigation.
Pairing iconic author Rachel Pollack’s ahead-of-its-time 2002 mystery with contemporary commentary that sheds new light on her fiction and its place in trans literary history, this reissue of A Secret Woman reveals a strange, specific transfeminine world of the past that remains fresh and relevant today. Here, Pollack gives us a virtuosic mystery novel that contains its own secret: the most direct and personal statement she made about being a trans woman.
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Person
Rachel Pollack (1945–2023) authored forty-one books, including two award-winning novels—Unquenchable Fire, winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and Godmother Night, winner of the World Fantasy Award—as well as a celebrated run on Doom Patrol for DC Comics and a series of books about Tarot cards known around the world. She designed and drew her own Tarot deck, The Shining Tribe Tarot. She lectured on four continents and taught for eleven years at Goddard College’s MFA writing program. Rachel lived with her wife and manager Zoe Matoff in New York’s Hudson Valley.
Cat Fitzpatrick is the editrix at LittlePuss Press, an independent feminist press run by trans women (www.littlepuss.net) and the author of the novel-in-verse The Call Out, winner of the 2023 Lambda Literary award in Transgender Fiction. Her next book is The Dinner Party: A Book About Love, forthcoming from Seven Stories Press in May 2026. Her website is at www.catfitzpatrick.net. She is based in Brooklyn, NY.
Robyn Gigl is an attorney at Dilworth Paxson, LLP, and the author of four novels featuring Erin McCabe, a transgender criminal defense attorney. Her debut, By Way of Sorrow, was called “quietly groundbreaking” by The New York Times. TIME magazine selected her second novel, Survivor’s Guilt, as one of the 100 best Mystery/Thriller books of all time. It was also named as one of the best crime novels of 2022 by The New York Times and won the Joseph Hansen Award for LGBTQ+ Crime Writing. Her fourth novel, Nothing But the Truth, was selected by The New York Times as one of the best crime novels of 2024. She is based in Asbury Park, NJ.
Roz Kaveney is a poet, novelist, critic, and human rights activist. Her works include Reading the Vampire Slayer, the Lambda Award–winning Tiny Pieces of Skull, the five Rhapsody of Blood novels of the fantastic, and some English versions of Catullus. She lives in London.