Kate Delafield is a former Marine and long-serving homicide detective with the Los Angeles Police Department. At last report she had retired from the force and was considering setting up her own detective agency.
She is the protagonist of a series of novels and one short story written by Katherine V. Forrest beginning in 1984.
Background[]
Detective Kate Delafield’s life reads like a dossier of grit, heartbreak and unyielding integrity. Born in the early 1950s, she volunteered for the U.S. Marine Corps and saw combat in Vietnam—an experience that forged in her a rigid moral code and the steely discipline she would later bring to the Los Angeles Police Department.
Upon returning stateside in the mid-1970s, Delafield joined the LAPD at a time when the Department’s rank-and-file culture was notoriously racist, misogynistic, and homophobic. Undeterred, she seized every opportunity to prove herself, rising steadily through the homicide ranks. By 1984, she was a respected lead detective—methodical in interview rooms, relentless in pursuing forensic leads, and guided always by duty and honor.
Delafield’s closest relationship was with Anne, a devoted schoolteacher who shared her home for twelve years. As a closeted gay woman in a department that would have torn them apart, Kate and Anne feigned roommate status—maintaining a separate closet, lingerie stashed in a second bedroom, and virtually no visible intimacy. When Anne was killed in a car accident, Delafield learned of it in her lieutenant’s office—forced to stand silent, telling herself, “Don’t react. Don’t cry. Don’t even speak.” Her grief remained buried, unshared with anyone.
Kate’s professional partner was Detective Ed Taylor—a man whose casual misogyny and homophobia grated against her values. Together they tackled what Taylor dismissed as “amateur city,” the routine office-building murder that tested both detectives’ skills. Despite his biases, Taylor could not deny Kate’s steely competence—and over time, her quiet strength earned even from him a grudging respect.
In 1987, Delafield led the investigation into the murder of nineteen-year-old Dory Quillin outside The Nightwood Bar. There she met Maggie Schaeffer, the bar’s owner and Kate’s first true confidante in the lesbian community. The case was fraught—Dory’s uncooperative parents, anti-cop prejudice within the bar, and her own unexpected attraction to patron Andrea Ross complicated every step. Though she cracked the case, Kate emerged more isolated than ever, haunted by how deeply her job conflicted with the only world in which she felt truly herself.
Two years later, on Thanksgiving Day, Kate and Taylor investigated the poisoning of Hollywood director Owen Sinclair at the Beverly Malibu. As clues—from arsenic-laced bourbon to a missing photo frame—led Kate through old-guard industry resentments, she found herself drawn to witness Paula Grant and then her niece Aimee. Aimee Grant would become Kate’s most serious post-Anne relationship, yet their love was marked by turbulence: careers in conflict, Kate’s self-loathing over years in the closet, and the very real fear that her identity could still cost them everything.
Mandated to retire in 2013, Delafield spiraled—bereft of purpose, dependent on alcohol, and tormented by guilt over her secret life. Five months into retirement, Captain Carolina Walcott quietly asked her to locate Kate's last partner, Joe Cameron, who had gone missing. She ventured into the Mojave high desert, the locale of Joe's family home, where a potential killer lurked. At the same time - with the help of therapist Calla Deerborn - she confronted the choices and compromises that had shaped her career. There, the most dangerous adversary she faced was herself.
Four years later, even as she was coming to grips with Maggie's terminal illness, a twenty-year-old homicide—the brutal killing of fifteen-year-old April Shuster—threatened to expose evidence she’d once mishandled. Determined to protect the ones she loved and redeem her own legacy, Delafield plunged back into detective work, drawing on every lesson learned in Vietnam, in the closet, and in the labyrinth of Los Angeles homicide.
Through decades of secret love, unpunished bigotry, and personal loss, Detective Kate Delafield’s story remains a testament to courage—both on the streets and within the silent chambers of the human heart.
Appearances[]
- Amateur City (1984)
- Murder at the Nightwood Bar (1987)
- "Jessie: A Kate Delafield Story" in Dreams and Swords (1987)
- The Beverly Malibu (1989)
- Murder By Tradition (1991)
- Liberty Square (1996)
- Apparition Alley (1997)
- Sleeping Bones (1999)
- Hancock Park (2004)
- High Desert (2013)
- Delafield (2022)
External Links[]
- Kate Delafield at Goodreads
- Katherine V. Forrest at Wikipedia
- The Politics of Pride: A Personal Journey by Katherine V. Forrest at Lodestar Quarterly
- The Price You Pay: Of Crimes and Closets at Los Angeles Review of Books