Barcelona

Cassandra Reilly, the translator-sleuth, first appeared in a story in the British anthology Reader, I Murdered Him. "Murder at the International Feminist Book Fair" was a joke, but Cassandra soon took on a life of her own in Gaudi Afternoon, a comic thriller set in Barcelona. Trouble in Transylvania (Hungary and Romania) and The Case of the Orphaned Bassoonists (Venice) soon followed, along with the collection The Death of a Much-Travelled Woman.

GAUDI AFTERNOON
Published under the name Barbara Wilson
Seal Press, 1990
ISBN-13: 9780931188893
ISBN-10: 093118889x

Winner of a British Crime Writers' Award
for Best Mystery Based in Europe

Winner of a Lambda Literary Award
for Lesbian Mystery

See the film (only tangentially connected to the book but still fun and with a great performance by Marcia Gay Harden as Frankie) Gaudi Afternoon, directed by Susan Seidelman, with Judy Davis, Marcia Gay Harden, Juliette Lewis and Lili Taylor.

Cassandra Reilly is a footloose Irish-American based in London, currently in the midst of translating a magic realism novel about the search for a lost mother. When she gets an offer from a San Franciscan femme fatale to look for her husband in Barcelona, Cassandra can't resist—and she chases people of all genders in this high-spirited comic thriller.

REVIEWS and PRAISE:

From Amazon.com:
Barbara Wilson's mysteries are witty, fast-paced, and fun to read. Plus, they have enough politics so that you can tell yourself that reading them is good for you. Gaudi Afternoon, written before "gender studies" became a buzz phrase, looks and laughs at what makes a gal straight or queer, femme or butch, lesbian or dyke, transgendered or translated. Cassandra Reilly, Wilson's wry, savvy, globe-trotting sleuth, charges through Barcelona to find a missing person or two of indeterminate gender.

From The New York Times:
A high-spirited comic adventure…In the same way that she works issues of sexual politics into her madcap plot, Ms. Wilson also makes the city of Barcelona a lively party to her action…Olé!

From Booklist:
There hasn't been this much cross-dressing, confusion, and hilarity since Rosalind entered the Forest of Arden.

From Kirkus Reviews:
A quirky, often funny wild-goose chase…Feminism as redefined by Marx (Groucho).