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Book Description
Luang kho ngu hao. Now I put my hand in the cobra’s throat.
Tuki Aparecio did not kill her lover. She did not burn down the Painted Lady—at least, not with fire. Tuki lit up the stage nightly, with her hair in braids and her glorious costumes; glittering, smoldering, singing her heart out for an audience who loved her. She brought the house down with her performances. But she’s innocent of murder, innocent of arson.
How can Michael DeCastro possibly hope to defend this beautiful drag queen, who brings with her a whole pack of nasty little secrets, straight from Bangkok’s notorious tenderloin district? She speaks in aphorisms, the wisdom of the Buddha combined with the lyrics of Whitney Houston. She is fascinating. And Michael can’t let her go to jail.
Praise for Provincetown Follies, Bangkok Blues
"Peffer (Killing Neptune's Daughter) explores sexual ambiguity in this offbeat legal procedural/whodunit. Callow public defender Michael DeCastro undergoes a baptism of fire with his first murder case: the defendant, Tuki Aparecio, is a Provincetown drag queen from Thailand (via Vietnam) accused of killing her lover, Alby Costelano, before setting a fire to cover her traces. Despite himself-and his imminent wedding to an increasingly annoyed fiancée-DeCastro finds his feelings toward his client evolving into romantic ones, which lands him in some compromising positions. The narrative alternates between Michael's sexually confused point-of-view and Tuki's flashbacks to her dark past in Bangkok and to the events leading up to the crime. Some readers may have difficulty sympathizing with Tuki's melodrama (e.g., suicide attempts, lovers' tantrums) and Michael's naïveté, but fans of Jonathan Ames's The Extra Man and other gender-bending fiction should be intrigued.—Publishers Weekly
"Tuki Aparecio, a popular drag entertainer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, is arrested for arson and murder. The defense attorney assigned to represent Tuki, Michael DeCastro, immediately realizes that this will be no easy case: his client's life is full of mysteries, most of which he is not keen to divulge. Less a murder mystery than a journey of discovery, the book is really a story of the slow road from suspicion to trust. As the drag-queen Tuki and the vaguely homophobic Michael circle each other, philosophically speaking, they find common ground, and Michael surprises himself by his willingness to sacrifice his own career to keep his client out of jail. An intriguing, offbeat mystery."—Booklist
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