John Copenhaver is an award-winning crime author whose Hall of Mirrors was named a New York Times Crime Novel of the Year and won the Left Coast Crime Award for Best Historical Mystery. His debut, Dodging and Burning, earned the 2019 Macavity Award for Best First Mystery, and The Savage Kind took home the 2021 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Mystery. He is also co-editor of Crime Ink: Iconic, a queer-inspired crime fiction anthology. A champion of queer voices, Copenhaver is a founding member of Queer Crime Writers and sits on the board of International Thriller Writers. His stories have appeared in CrimeReads, Electric Lit, and The Gay & Lesbian Review. When he’s not writing, he teaches creative writing and literature, mentors aspiring authors, and lives in Richmond, Virginia, with his husband, ceramist Jeffery Paul Herrity.

Some inheritances you can’t refuse. Some killers you can’t outrun. Some passions you can’t bury.

Washington, D.C., September 1964.

Judy Nightingale and Philippa Dolittle, née Watson, were once each other’s whole world. They haven’t spoken in years. Then Judy’s latest novel, The Savage Kind, drags their shared past into public view and forces an uneasy reunion.

Then comes the shock: Judy’s estranged birth mother—the woman who once tried to poison them both—has died, leaving her everything. A house. A fortune. A staff that watches her too closely. Soon after, letters begin arriving, each signed “Mother” and enclosing pages from Judy’s long-lost radio play, “Frankenstein’s Sister.” Warnings of revenge from beyond the grave.

The warnings turn real. After a dinner party thick with old grievances, a guest is dead, and Judy’s Mercedes is found in a ravine, its brake line cut. Judy is the intended victim.

She turns to the only person who ever truly understood her: Philippa, now married with a child, her past buried beneath a life she has worked hard not to examine. Together they follow the letters back toward everything they never resolved and toward a killer who has been patient for a very long time . . . and still writing letters.

Goddess of Love concludes John Copenhaver’s Nightingale Trilogy, following Hall of Mirrors, a New York Times Best Crime Novel of 2024.

Queer, suspenseful, and deeply seductive, this is a murder mystery where love is both the most powerful weapon—and the deadliest risk.

When a popular mystery novelist dies suspiciously, his writing partner must untangle the author’s connection to a serial killer in award-winning John Copenhaver’s new novel set in 1950s McCarthy-era Washington, DC.

In May 1954, Lionel Kane witnesses his apartment engulfed in flames with his lover and writing partner, Roger Raymond, inside. Police declare it a suicide due to gas ignition, but Lionel refuses to believe Roger was suicidal.

A month earlier, Judy Nightingale and Philippa Watson—the tenacious and troubled heroines from The Savage Kind—attend a lecture by Roger and, being eager fans, befriend him. He has just been fired from his day job at the State Department, another victim of the Lavender Scare, an anti-gay crusade led by figures like Senator Joseph McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover, claiming homosexuals are security risks. Little do Judy and Philippa know, but their obsessive manhunt of the past several years has fueled the flames of his dismissal.

They have been tracking their old enemy Adrian Bogdan, a spy and vicious serial killer protected by powerful forces in the government. He’s on the rampage again, and the police are ignoring his crimes. Frustrated, they send their research to the media and their favorite mystery writer anonymously, hoping to inspire someone, somehow, to publish on the crimes—anything to draw Bogdan out. But has their persistence brought deadly forces to the writing team behind their most beloved books?

In the wake of Roger’s death, Lionel searches for clues, but Judy and Philippa threaten his quest, concealing dark secrets of their own. As the crimes of the past and present converge, danger mounts, and the characters race to uncover the truth, even if it means bending their moral boundaries to stop a killer.