Still one of the strangest and most successful crossover books in contemporary Australian writing.

Part detective novel, part lesbian noir, part poetry sequence, it follows private investigator Jill Fitzpatrick as she takes on the case of a missing young woman and gets pulled into a world of obsession, sex, performance, and violence. Porter writes the whole thing in verse, but it moves with the momentum of a thriller — sharp, dirty, funny, and unnervingly elegant.

The poetry is not decorative; it is the engine. Porter takes noir’s usual machinery — desire, risk, glamour, corruption — and rewires it through a specifically Australian, specifically queer sensibility. 

Hyland House, South Melbourne, first edition, 1994; this copy is the 1994 reprint. Paperback original. An early signed Australian copy of Porter’s breakthrough verse novel. The book won the Age Book of the Year for Poetry in 1994, along with the National Book Council Award for Poetry and Braille Book of the Year. In great condition.