Series reading order:
Gays of Our Lives
The Butch and the Beautiful
The Queer and the Restless
One Life to Lose
As La Vista Turns
What it’s about:
Welcome to La Vista, California!
Searching for love? A hookup? A few hours of debate and debauchery with friends? Look no further than Club Fred’s, the diverse queer community’s favorite watering hole in La Vista’s newly revitalized Harbor District!
Club Fred’s is the kind of place where everyone knows your name—and quite few of them know about that birthmark on your upper thigh, the way you laugh too loudly after a single shot of tequila, and the reason you broke up with your last partner. The only downside to a night at Fred’s? Every now and then someone walks out the door and winds up dead.
When a killer stalks the streets of La Vista, some parts of the community draw closer, and some are pushed further apart. But in the end, they’re all in it together—for better or for worse.
Why you should read this series: Kris Ripper knocks it out of the park with these over the top, messy, soap opera inspired books chock full of nuanced queer characters! With titles all loosely based on the soaps we know and love (hey, unabashed General Hospital lover here!), each novel follows a particular set of characters as they meet, learn more about each other, and ultimately fall in love in the small town of La Vista, California. The city plays as much a role as the characters themselves since overarching the entire series is a bit of suspense as a killer begins targeting members of this tightly knit community. As we get further along in the books, characters overlap, landmarks become recognizable, and the cast of characters keeps growing until you’ll find yourself obsessed and completely convinced that this town and its inhabitants are real.
My personal favorites are: book one, Gays of Our Lives, which features a grumpy hero with MS whose unexpected encounter with a hipster on a bus forces him to take stock of who he is and what he ultimately wants; and book two, The Butch and the Beautiful, which spotlights dependable teacher, Jaq, and her own chance encounter with gorgeous, outgoing divorcee who is definitely not the type of person Jaq imagined for a long term relationship. The entire series is excellent however and you’ll definitely want to read all five books in order to find out more about the interconnected relationships but also the killer and the toll these murders take on the community…with happy endings, I swear!
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Enjoy series centered in a city that becomes as real as the characters themselves? Tell me all about your favorites! I love to chat all things book related on Twitter: @writerjudithutz
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