A Secret Woman

“Suspenseful and revolutionary, A Secret Woman is a police procedural in which a detective must solve herself as well as the murder. Full of crafty misdirects, fun surprises, and deep emotional truths as one story unfolds inside another.” —Rachel Gold, author of Being Emily

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.