Murder at the Nightwood Bar Review — Is It Worth Reading?

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Verdict: A landmark 1987 lesbian police mystery with a genuinely affecting case and a closing chapter readers still talk about, held back by dated racial language and a romance subplot that sits uneasily beside the investigation.

Best for: Readers who want a tight, character-driven procedural set inside a real lesbian community, and who can read a book from 1987 as a book from 1987 — including the parts that have aged badly.

Heat level: ★★☆☆☆ (2/5 — one on-page love scene, secondary to the case)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.7/5 — a 3.92 Goodreads average across 941 ratings, pulled down by a consistent minority objection to how it writes about race)

Tropes: Police procedural, closeted detective, lesbian bar community, cop-versus-community tension, detective falls for someone close to the case, mismatched partners, LAPD homophobia, 1980s Los Angeles, queer history.

Murder at the Nightwood Bar by Katherine V. Forrest is the second of ten Kate Delafield novels, first published by Naiad Press in 1987 and kept in print today by Bella Books — a lesbian crime novel set in Los Angeles, in which a deeply closeted LAPD homicide detective is sent to investigate the killing of a nineteen-year-old outside a lesbian bar, and finds that the women inside see her badge before they see anything else.

It holds a 3.92 average across 941 Goodreads ratings, sits at 4.5 stars on Amazon, and belongs to a series often described as the first to put a lesbian police detective at the centre of American crime fiction. The reviews agree on the case and the history, and split sharply on how the book handles race and on the romance it wedges in beside the investigation. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is Murder at the Nightwood Bar About?

Murder at the Nightwood Bar is a police procedural first and a piece of lesbian social history second, and the romance is a distant third. The book is built on the machinery of a homicide investigation — interviews, alibis, a partner, a squad room — but the thing it actually cares about is what happens when the institution and the community collide. In 1987 Los Angeles the LAPD is openly hostile to gay people, and the women at the Nightwood have every reason to treat a cop as an enemy.

Kate Delafield is the cop, and what she lacks is a place to stand. She is a lesbian nobody at work knows about, investigating a crime inside a community that does not know she belongs to it and would not trust her if it did. Andrea Ross, a regular at the bar, is one of the women who make that plain. The book stays in close third person on Kate throughout, which means every hostile look lands on someone who cannot answer it honestly — and that is where most of its tension comes from.

What Makes This Lesbian Police Mystery Work

• The bar as community, not backdrop: Readers repeatedly single out the Nightwood itself — its regulars, its loyalties, its suspicion of outsiders — as the most vivid thing in the book, and our own mystery and thriller guide makes the same point.
• A stronger mystery than book one: The most common comparison in the reviews is with Amateur City, and it runs one way. Readers describe this case as more tightly built and more affecting than the debut.
• Kate in the closet: The conflict between Kate’s job and her identity is the engine of the series, and this is the book where it first becomes painful rather than theoretical.
• Queer history, told from inside: Several readers now read it partly as a document — cassette tapes, no phones, and a bar culture that has largely disappeared.
• The final chapter: The coda after the case closes is the part readers remember. Reviews call the ending gut-wrenching, and the closing pages give it a counterweight that is genuinely moving.

Book Synopsis

It is a June night in Los Angeles, and a young woman is dead in the parking lot of the Nightwood Bar. She was nineteen. She had been living on the edges of the city for a while, and she had been coming to the Nightwood for long enough that the women there think of her as one of theirs.

Detective Kate Delafield of LAPD Homicide catches the case with her partner, Ed Taylor, an older cop who is decent in his way and badly out of his depth in a lesbian bar. The regulars close ranks immediately. To them, the police are the people who raid bars, and a woman detective with a notebook is no exception. None of them know that Kate spends every working day hiding exactly what they are.

The victim’s parents arrive with their own version of who their daughter was, and it does not match the one Kate is hearing at the bar. Her partner has theories Kate does not share. And one of the regulars, Andrea Ross, is both the sharpest critic of the investigation and the person Kate cannot stop thinking about. As the interviews pile up, the question is no longer only who killed a girl in a parking lot. It is whether Kate can find out while keeping the two halves of her own life from colliding — and whether the women of the Nightwood will ever let her in.

My Review

The case is excellent, and I want to say that first because the rest of this review has to deal with how old the book is. Forrest sets up a killing that looks like the kind of violence the Nightwood’s regulars already expect from the world, then peels the investigation back layer by layer through the victim’s family, her life on the street and the bar that took her in. At around 240 pages, it wastes nothing.

The other genuine strength is Kate herself, and specifically the way the book uses her closet. Forrest has called the closet her great subject, and this is where it earns that. Kate is the only person in the story who understands both the LAPD and the Nightwood, and she is trusted by neither. Every interview at the bar is two conversations at once. Ed Taylor, her straight, older partner, is written with more sympathy than the setup suggests — part of what Publishers Weekly liked in 1988.

Where it struggles is the thing a 2026 reader will notice fastest, and it is not a single-reviewer gripe: several independent Goodreads reviewers flag the way the book describes women of colour, particularly the exoticising language around Andrea, who is mixed-race. A smaller number object to how Kate pushes a Black witness toward pressing charges without much sense of what that would cost her. Around that sit the structural complaints. Kate sleeps with a woman connected to the case after a matter of days, and readers who go on through the series note this becomes a habit; a few say the love scene feels inserted rather than earned. And a handful say the solution is guessable to anyone who reads a lot of mysteries — a minority view, but a real one.

One expectation to reset: it is shelved and sold alongside lesbian romance, and it is not one. The relationship with Andrea is a subplot, and readers consistently describe it as secondary to the case. If “lesbian romance” is what drew you, recalibrate — this is a crime novel with a lesbian heart. If you were worried it would be a romance with a body attached, relax.

My honest note: A four-star mystery and a genuinely important book, wrapped in a romance subplot and racial language that have not aged well. Read it for Kate, the Nightwood and the last chapter, and go in knowing what 1987 sounds like.

Element	In Murder at the Nightwood Bar
Central relationship	Kate Delafield & Andrea Ross — closeted LAPD detective and bar regular connected to the case; a subplot, not the story
Core tropes	Police procedural, closeted detective, cop-versus-community, mismatched partners, LAPD homophobia, queer history
Setting	Los Angeles, 1980s — a lesbian bar and the LAPD homicide squad that distrusts it
Heat level	2/5 — one on-page love scene, secondary to the case
Series	Kate Delafield book 2 of 10 — the case closes; Kate’s personal arc continues through the series
Content notes	Murder and violence, homophobia and gay-bashing, police hostility, child sexual abuse, sex work and homelessness, parental rejection, dated racial language, breast cancer

How Spicy Is Murder at the Nightwood Bar?

A 2/5, and I am deriving that rather than quoting it. romance.io does not index Murder at the Nightwood Bar, which is itself informative: nobody is cataloguing this book as romance. Reader reports agree on what is there — a single love scene between Kate and Andrea, written on the page rather than faded out, and nothing else of the kind. Mystery readers call it part of the story but not the point.

The one thing worth flagging in advance is context rather than content: Andrea is connected to the investigation, and at least a few reviewers raise the professional ethics of a detective sleeping with someone close to her case. No reviewer I found flags anything more explicit than that one scene. If you want an investigation with more romance on the page, Proper English puts a murder inside an open-door romance at 3/5, and The Red Files runs an investigation alongside a slow burn at a similar low heat.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you read mysteries for the case and the detective rather than the romance, you want to see a lesbian bar community written from the inside, you are interested in where lesbian crime fiction came from, and you can read a 1987 novel on its own terms.

You may want to skip it if: you want a romance with a central relationship and an ending to match, dated language about race will take you out of the book, a detective sleeping with someone connected to her case is a dealbreaker, or you need a mystery you cannot guess.

In short: a sharp, moving procedural and an important piece of queer history, with edges that a modern reader will feel.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (September 2026)

There is no live discourse around this nearly forty-year-old book in the usual sense. I found no meaningful Reddit footprint, no BookTok activity, no romance.io entry and no StoryGraph reading stats worth citing. What it has instead is a slow, durable reputation: 941 Goodreads ratings and 70 written reviews, a 4.5-star average across 166 Amazon ratings with 68% at five stars, a 1988 Publishers Weekly review that praised it for “not portraying all women as wonderful and all men as evil,” and a 2015 Los Angeles Review of Books conversation in which Forrest describes the book as the one designed to connect Kate with her own community. The newer way in is audio: Tantor Media released an unabridged edition in April 2022, read by Kate Zane and running 7 hours 15 minutes, and at least one Audible listener credits the narration for making the old mystery land. Libro.fm’s listing marks this edition as AI-narrated, so check the sample before you buy.

Prefer audio? Listen to Murder at the Nightwood Bar on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The mystery, first — “shocking” and “gut-wrenching” are the recurring words for the resolution, and readers who expected a historical artefact keep saying they were gripped. Then the history: several reviewers describe the book as a window onto 1980s lesbian life, and the bar culture in particular is praised as authentic rather than decorative. Kate’s closet draws admiration as a character problem rather than a coming-out story. The final chapter gets singled out more than any other scene in the book.

What readers argue about and complain about: Race, above everything. The most repeated criticism in the low- and mid-star reviews is the exoticising description of Andrea and of other characters of colour — well-meant, readers say, and still uncomfortable. A smaller group adds Kate’s handling of a Black witness. The romance is the second theme: it moves fast, it is entangled with the case, and the pattern of Kate getting involved with someone close to an investigation bothers readers who have followed the series. Third, and quieter: the solution. A handful of experienced mystery readers say they identified the killer early, against a larger group who were blindsided. Low ratings are rare — under 5% of Goodreads ratings sit at one or two stars — so these complaints mostly pull four-star reviews down to three rather than sinking the book.

The series question everyone should ask first: This case is complete — it opens and closes inside the book, with no cliffhanger. What carries forward is Kate herself, whose move out of the closet unfolds across ten novels from 1984 to 2022. You can start here; readers generally rate it above Amateur City (3.70 on Goodreads), and the series climbs from here — The Beverly Malibu sits at 4.00, Murder by Tradition at 4.11, and the 2022 finale Delafield at 4.44.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Murder at the Nightwood Bar a romance novel?

No. It is a police procedural with a romantic subplot. The relationship between Kate Delafield and Andrea Ross is secondary to the investigation, and readers shelve it as mystery first.

How spicy is Murder at the Nightwood Bar?

A 2/5. Readers report a single on-page love scene and nothing else of the kind. romance.io does not list the book, so the rating comes from reader reports.

Do I need to read Amateur City first?

No. The mystery is self-contained and the book works as an entry point. Readers generally rate it above Amateur City, which sits at 3.70 on Goodreads against 3.92 here.

Has Murder at the Nightwood Bar aged well?

Partly. The case and the portrait of 1980s lesbian life hold up, and readers still find the ending powerful. Several reviewers flag exoticising language about characters of colour that reads badly today.

Is there an audiobook?

Yes. Tantor Media released it in April 2022, read by Kate Zane and running 7 hours 15 minutes. Libro.fm labels its edition as AI-narrated.

If You Loved Murder at the Nightwood Bar, Read These Next

If the investigation was the draw, The Red Files by Lee Winter puts two women on the trail of a scandal and gives the relationship the room this book does not. For a murder with the romance at the centre instead of the margin, Proper English moves the crime to an Edwardian country house. And if what stayed with you was the queer underworld and the danger of being seen, The Best Bad Things takes that into an 1880s smuggling operation at much higher heat.

For more in this register, browse our lesbian mystery and thriller books guide or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

Murder at the Nightwood Bar is a book whose importance and whose flaws both come from the year it was written. The case is tight and affecting, Kate’s closet gives every interview a second layer, and the Nightwood is a community rendered by someone who knew it. It is also a book with dated racial language, a romance that sits awkwardly inside an investigation, and a solution some experienced readers will see coming. For anyone who wants a real mystery and a record of lesbian life before it went mainstream, the trade is easily worth it — just go in reading it as a 1987 book rather than a 2026 one. Check Murder at the Nightwood Bar on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Murder at the Nightwood Bar ranks as a foundational lesbian crime novel — moving, tightly plotted and historically significant, dated in its language about race, and best approached for the case and the community rather than the romance.

The Evidence Scorecard

Overall ★★★★☆ 3.7/5

• ✓ 3.92 average across 941 Goodreads ratings
• ✓ 4.5 stars across 166 Amazon ratings
• ✓ Under 5% of Goodreads ratings below three
• ✓ Dated racial language is the recurring objection

Romance ★★★☆☆ 2.8/5

• ✓ Andrea challenges Kate from the first scene
• ✓ Attraction tied to Kate’s isolation
• ✓ Subplot, not the story
• ✓ Fast, and entangled with the case

Characters ★★★★☆ 3.9/5

• ✓ Kate’s closet gives her real depth
• ✓ Ed Taylor better than the setup suggests
• ✓ Bar regulars written as a community
• ✓ Andrea filtered through exoticising description

Writing ★★★★☆ 3.7/5

• ✓ Clear, economical procedural prose
• ✓ Around 240 pages with little waste
• ✓ Interviews carry double meaning
• ✓ Period language on race reads badly now

Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 4.1/5

• ✓ Resolution called gut-wrenching by readers
• ✓ Final chapter singled out repeatedly
• ✓ Community hostility costs Kate personally
• ✓ Heavy material may need pacing

Heat Level ★★☆☆☆ 2/5

• ✓ One on-page love scene
• ✓ Not indexed by romance.io
• ✓ Readers call it secondary to the case
• ✓ Professional ethics questioned by reviewers

Ending ★★★★☆ 4/5

• ✓ Case fully resolved, no cliffhanger
• ✓ Many readers blindsided by the solution
• ✓ Closing chapter lands emotionally
• ✓ Guessable for seasoned mystery readers

Re-read Value ★★★★☆ 3.5/5

• ✓ Short enough for an easy return
• ✓ 7h15m audio as a second pass
• ✓ Later Delafield books rate higher
• ✓ Mysteries lose force once solved

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