A new mystery by six time Lambda Literary award-winning author, Michael Nava. It’s classic noir with a queer twist. Set in San Francisco in 1984, Henry Rios is hired by an insurance company to investigate the apparently accidental death by carbon monoxide poisoning of Bill Ryan in his Castro Street apartment, but Rios becomes convinced Ryan’s death was no accident, and that his young lover is … implicated.David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl, calls Carved In Bone a “rich, haunting,” novel that features “one of the most original protagonists in American crime fiction.”
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Michael Nava is one of my favorite gay mystery writers. I read the original series when it came out back in the 1980s and fell in love with Henry Rios, with his honor, his intelligence, his fierce need to find the truth and see justice done, his drinking, his flaws, his strained family past, and all the parts that make up this amazing, gay, Hispanic lawyer and crusader. So a new Henry Rios story after all this time is a gift.
This book slots in after the first story in the series (The Little Death which has now been rewritten as Lay Your Sleeping Head ) – here we see Henry after he has hit bottom with his drinking and his losses, managing to finally get help. He’s trying to rebuild his life. Unable to drum up enough criminal defense cases to pay the rent, he takes up insurance claim work. His first assignment is a gay man dead of a gas leak in the apartment he shared with his lover. The lover, Nick, who was the beneficiary, has vanished, and Henry needs to find him, confirm that the death was accidental, and sign off on the payment. But Nick turns out to be elusive in different ways, the dead man had a difficult past, and this may not be a simple accidental death.
The Henry portion of this story is set in the late 1980s as the AIDS crisis began to really take hold in San Francisco, which along with New York City was ground zero for the gay plague and the devastation it worked on a generation of gay men. The death of Bill, a gay man in his thirties, by accident has a different poignancy set alongside the deaths of so many young gay men from the horrible workings of a disease that was still not well understood. Testing has become available, but as lover after friend is lost, there’s a fatalistic mood where every man assumes he’s probably positive, mixed with deep anger at the cruelty of fate and society.
And most tellingly and clearly in this story, there is the impact of AIDS on a generation just beginning to believe that their families and churches and authorities were wrong about gay being unnatural and evil. How do you begin to purge that internalized shame and self-disgust from your soul, when God seems to be striking down gay man after gay man with the most horrific suffering? When the more sex a guy has had, the higher his risk? When everything about this plague seems designed to confirm that gay men are miserable sinners unfit for love, undeserving of life?
Half of the book is the story of the dead man – Bill. He comes to San Francisco in the 1970s, exiled from his family, after his father finds him with another boy and beats him hard enough to almost kill him. At eighteen, Bill is terrified, naive, with one interrupted blow-job the extent of his gay experience. He’s the product of his upraising, a romantic who wants one lover and a house and picket fence life. He also has a deep well of self-hate inside him. We watch him learn about being gay from the funhouse mirror that is The Castro, from committed gay couples buying homes together, to the rent boys and gay bars and bath houses and underworld, and then the tide of AIDS breaking across that community.
The mystery is a good one. When I thought I had a handle on how things happened, I was surprised again by little twists that open up both the events and the psychology of the participants. The end was satisfying, and real, and poignant.
The context is even better. This book is lest-we-forget reading, and I’d like to see young people read this series for the immersive effect it has on understanding gay history. Like the picture of the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus, with the black figures of men lost to AIDS dominating the image, this book is a little gut punch of remembrance and loss, an inside look at how those years impacted a generation. (The series, perforce for its time and setting, carries this sub-theme forward through several of the mysteries – all good reading.)
And yet the story is also positive, and hopeful. Henry is surviving despite all the things pulling him down. He’s living with purpose, fighting a good fight against his addiction, despite the sword of his possible HIV status after years of unsafe sex hanging over his head. He has a good friend, and is brilliant and dogged at his job. Death may be stalking The Castro, but people are living their lives despite that.
This series is highly recommended, a multiple reread for me. I picked up the first book revision immediately and dove into it, reminded of how much I like Henry. (Without looking back, I think that the new version is both smoother and more explicit than the original – unsurprisingly since on-page gay sex was far less acceptable in the 1980s.) If you haven’t yet encountered Henry Rios, I recommend starting with book 1 – Lay Your Sleeping Head, but this one could stand alone as a first time read.
It really captured the loneliness of gay youth in the 50’s to 70’s. Going to the library to read about people who might be like you. And the books painted a terrible picture of homosexuality making you feel even worse. And the the pain of the early HIV epidemic before there was anything other than a death sentence.
A mystery but so much more. Henry Rios is in the early days of sobriety and in the early days of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco. It is his story and that of the man whose death he is investigating, that of two men wrestling with their demons and homophobia, from the outside and within. And with fear. And with truth. I HIGHLY recommend this whole series although sadly the one I consider best, Golden Boy, is not available in ebook format.
Michael Nava’s novels are consistently excellent. His central character, Henry Rios, is always rock solid. I have read all of Nava’s books, and I don’t have a favorite, because I love all of them. I highly recommend this book!
poor stuff