Lavender House, 1952: the family seat of recently deceased matriarch Irene Lamontaine, head of the famous Lamontaine soap empire. Irene’s recipes for her signature scents are a well guarded secret―but it’s not the only one behind these gates. This estate offers a unique freedom, where none of the residents or staff hide who they are. But to keep their secret, they’ve needed to keep others out. And now they’re worried they’re keeping a murderer in.

Irene’s widow hires Evander Mills to uncover the truth behind her mysterious death. Andy, recently fired from the San Francisco police after being caught in a raid on a gay bar, is happy to accept―his calendar is wide open. And his secret is the kind of secret the Lamontaines understand.

Andy had never imagined a world like Lavender House. He’s seduced by the safety and freedom found behind its gates, where a queer family lives honestly and openly. But that honesty doesn’t extend to everything, and he quickly finds himself a pawn in a family game of old money, subterfuge, and jealousy―and Irene’s death is only the beginning.

When your existence is a crime, everything you do is criminal, and the gates of Lavender House can’t lock out the real world forever. Running a soap empire can be a dirty business.

I picked this one up on a whim after seeing a few positive reviews go by, and I’m so glad I did because I really enjoyed it. The book has a sort of Agatha Christie whodunit energy, except the detective at the center is a gay man trying to live in the shadows of a country that has not been kind to anyone who is not straight. That combination is what hooked me, and the book delivered on it.

The book is set in 1952, a time when the world was definitely not a safe space for queer people. Lavender House is a sprawling estate outside San Francisco. The family money comes from a soap business, but the bigger thing they’re guarding is a quiet, fiercely held secret. Everyone who lives and works on the property is queer. Inside the gates, nobody has to perform, but the cost of that freedom is keeping the rest of the world locked out. The matriarch who built the place has just died under conditions that don’t quite add up, and her widow brings in an outside investigator to figure out what happened. That investigator is Evander (Andy) Mills, a former San Francisco detective who just got pushed off the force after the wrong people noticed him at a gay bar. He has nothing left to lose, and he could use the money. Plus, he understands exactly what Lavender House is trying to protect because he’s been carrying the same kind of secret his whole life.

It’s no secret that places like Lavender House actually existed. Maybe not to the grand, scheming extreme as portrayed in this book, but households and communities were built to give queer people a safety net where they could be themselves in private while selling the public a completely different story. That historical reality is one of the things I loved most about the book. It grounds the mystery in something real. The estate isn’t just a clever setting. It’s a stand-in for an entire way of life that people built out of necessity.

The characters are all fantastic. Andy is a great anchor for the whole thing. He walks into Lavender House having spent his life either hiding or hating himself for not hiding well enough, and being inside a place where queer people get to just exist hits him in a way he wasn’t ready for. He’s investigating a murder, sure, but he’s also being shown a version of his life he didn’t know was possible. That double layer gave the book more emotional weight than I expected from the mystery setup and it gave the story a heavier weight.

The supporting cast at Lavender House is great too. Each of them has reasons to want Irene dead, reasons to want her alive, and reasons to keep certain things from coming up at the dinner table. The dynamics are fun to untangle, and Rosen lets you sit with them. By the time the answer arrives, the case feels like it landed where it was always heading.

The mystery itself is classic, and I mean that as a compliment. There aren’t a bunch of wild, ridiculous twists. It’s a real whodunit with red herrings, suspects with overlapping motives, and characters you can love or love to suspect. The fun is in the figuring out, not in some out-of-left-field reveal at the end. I missed this kind of mystery and didn’t realize how much until I was about halfway through this one. It’s a slower, smarter read than a lot of today’s thrillers and I appreciated that.

I’m thrilled this is a series. The setup at the end has me ready to follow Andy wherever he goes next. If you love a classic mystery with a slice of queer history thrown in, and a detective who is unconventional by a lot of the macho private investigator standards, this one is a great pick. I’m very glad I finally gave it a chance. I can’t wait to read the next.