Some books stay with you long after you have read them. "The Blue Place" is one of those. At once a mystery, a love story, an adventure, and a character study, author Nicola Griffith (well-known for her Lambda Award-winning science fiction novels Ammonite and Slow River), uses the English language like a weapon: she is both precise and deadly.

The hero of The Blue Place (and its sequel, Stay) is Aud Torvingen, a Norwegian-American ex-cop who also happens to be a lesbian. One of the most refreshing aspects of this novel is the fact that Aud’s sexuality is never debatable, nor is it an issue. Aud herself notes that she belongs to “the big bad butch club, where only dykes who have broken people’s noses are welcome.”

She is also independently wealthy, knows how to wear finely-cut suits, is familiar with packing a pistol on her thigh, and relaxes through martial arts and carpentry. In other words, Aud is almost unbelievably hot.

As a mystery novel, "The Blue Place" is a little shaky. Although the book in fact opens with a bang—an exploding bomb that kills an art historian and leaves behind a mass of pure cocaine—I found the crime and its investigation a bit tedious.

This is partly because the victim, Jim Lusk, is never fully explored; he is only a prop in a plot that actually revolves around his friend, Julia Lyons-Bennett, who hires Aud to find out who set off the bomb. Solving the mystery of Jim Lusk’s murder never matters to the reader, or even to Aud; it only matters to Julia.

Written in the first person, the reader gets to know Julia through Aud’s eyes--and those eyes are mesmerizing. Aud is a visceral, sexy woman, and she knows it. Griffith has created a character who narrates her life in lush, almost florid words, but the thickness of the narration sometimes contrasts oddly with the cold and calculating way that Aud approaches life and, more importantly, death. She has no compunctions about using violence, and she is so sure of her martial prowess it brings to mind superhero powers. That contrast, however, reveals to the reader that Aud is not merely an icy automaton; she feels things deeply.

The Blue Place is chock-full of interesting tidbits of information about furniture-making, how to pick up chicks, self-defense, and ice climbing. Is it surprising that Aud knows how to do all of these things, and she seems to do them all perfectly? Yes. At times I found myself thinking, this could never happen! But Aud is such an intriguing character, and Griffith’s writing is so compelling, that despite moments of incredulity, I couldn’t put down the book.

Griffith simply demands that you give in to her—or maybe it’s Aud who demands that you sit down in that chair, or on that train surrounded by strangers (where you encounter a sultry scene that reminds you that you’re reading a lesbian novel), and listen to her tale.

As a love story and a character study, The Blue Place is a wonderful piece of writing. Griffith has created a fascinating character in Aud Torvingen, and her relationship with Julia is skillfully incorporated into the narrator’s voice. Aud’s tone, her language, actually changes when she realizes how she feels about Julia, and we can see that Julia has made a significant impact on her as an individual.

If you’re looking for a finely-honed mystery that is uncovered through a detailed investigation, this is not the book for you. If, on the other hand, you aren’t overly concerned with connecting the plot points and are instead looking for a beautifully-written novel that is truly a thriller in all senses of the word, then pick up The Blue Place and plan to stay in for a day or two while you read it.

While you’re out there, you might want to pick up the sequel, Stay, because as soon as you read the last sentence of The Blue Place, you’ll need to have another page to turn.

Amazon.com: The Blue Place