Love Notes — Penny Mickelbury

We live in a youth-oriented culture--and nobody knows that better than a 50+year old woman looking for love. Despite all the commercials featuring silver haired characters, film and television still cast 30-year old women as the love interests of 60-year old men, and 60-year old women are hard to find on screen unless a witch or a bag lady is called for. So many 50+women looking for what they see as a last chance at love have taken to the internet. And if she is from a small town, is financially secure, and is willing to relocate--that love is waiting for her in Washington, DC! Lured not really to DC but to is Maryland and Virginia suburbs, and then to secluded lesbian bars where they are total strangers, the confused, lonely women do what confused, lonely people everywhere do: They talk to the bartender. But this bartender really cares about these confused, lonely women, and when the women begin to disappear, the bartender alerts her good friend who just happens to be Lt. Gianna Maglione, head of the DC Police Department's Hate Crimes Unit. All Gianna's senses go on alert because what she knows that her bartender friend does not is the existence of Jane Does in the morgue. Investigative newspaper reporter Mimi Patterson hears a version of the story from a couple of different sources, and while this isn't usually her kind of story--her reputation was built on sending sleazy, corrupt politicians and public officials to jail--she finds the common denominator, the path that always led her to the take-down of the corrupt officials. Follow the money was her rule. All those missing women were quite well-to-do. What happened to their houses and cars and bank accounts? But Gianna and the cops can answer those questions, too--and faster than Mimi can. But another question prods her: What's wrong with our culture that we so easily side-line women of a certain age? And why would smart, talented, wealthy women embrace danger--or worse--for one last chance at love?