Crossposts:

http://badgerbag.livejournal.com/489754.html

Murder at the Mendel by Gail Bowen has jumped the shark for internalized misogyny. Sally, the female protagonist has owned a feminist art gallery called Womancraft or womancare or something for 20 years but is now, without warning to anyone, selling it. Sally hates feminists. She hates her mother and idolizes her dad (who killed himself with poison when she was 13 and tried to kill her and her mom & they barely survived). Then Sally was somehow whisked off by a friend of the family at age 13 for a teenagerhood of molestation and no school ever again.

Back in the present of the novel while she's an adult, she plans to leave her husband and take their four year old daughter away to another country, to which everyone reacts with consternation and dumb plots & no one ever mentions joint custody or any sort of law governing child custody, separation, or divorce.

Then the manager of the women's art/craft gallery who Sally has clearly slept with or had an intense relationship with over the last 20 years goes berserk and has lesbian drama, then works on a super dramatic art piece with a mannequin and scalpel and electrified barbed wire, and then is killed gruesomely on the barbed wire and cooked. In a gallery. At her funeral it is all radical feminists, quilts with clitoris designs, and guerilla girls in gorilla outfits fist fighting with religious fundamentalist protestors. Oh, those wacky feminists! So wacky even when murdered! Sally mocks the dead woman and all feminists during the funeral During the fistfight, Sally defends the religious fundamentalist protestor "because 3 on one was unfair".

Fuuuuck this book.