A topical, tropical mystery replete with scenes of entertaining buddy comedy.
Two police detectives return in a drag-inspired whodunit set in Florida.
Charmingly mismatched sleuths Nick Scott and Norm Malone embark on a new adventure in this sequel, this time in sultry Key West, home to “chickens everywhere you walk, people greeting strangers as if they were good friends, and no one seeming to have a care in the world.” Nick, host of the eponymous TV chat show The Gay Detective, met the slouchy, heterosexual Norm in the previous installment of the series, in which they teamed up to catch the notorious killer The Reaper while becoming good friends and roommates. Now, as a thank-you gift from the Chicago Police Department, they’re vacationing together in Key West. Of particular interest to Nick is an annual New Year’s Eve performance by the local drag diva Sho Yu, set to descend upon her adoring fans in a giant red shoe to formally announce her engagement to strapping fiance Matt. To the shock of onlookers, the shoe catches fire on the way down, injuring Matt, and within moments Sho Yu turns up missing. Officer Raphael Perez recruits Nick and Norm to lend their talents to the investigation, one that becomes even darker when Police Commissioner Tom Moss is found dead in his office. The two detectives begin to piece together what increasingly looks like a series of connected killings by a sinister and enigmatic network. Stripper Merlot and a bevy of sassy drag queens (Mimi Peters, Sin Onhym, and Polly Saturates) turn up to crack some jokes and complicate the plot. Along the way, Nick and Norm each finds romance, discovering once again that “sex is the best drug out there and doesn’t require a script” and encountering a number of unforeseen hurdles. In this enjoyable caper, Michaels (The Gay Detective, 2015) displays a superb sense of humor, and he deploys it more successfully here than in his last book, using it to balance Nick’s complex emotions and the story’s suspense. Nick’s fraught hookups are effectively woven into the texture of the plot (“Raphael certainly knew how to push my buttons and that scared me. We hardly knew each other”). But his reaction to Norm’s own liaison—particularly the intensity of his anger—may strike some readers as more convenient to the narrative than psychologically realistic. But this is a quibble: Michaels’ beguiling new tale is an amusing and gripping way to spend a few hours.
A topical, tropical mystery replete with scenes of entertaining buddy comedy.Pub Date: May 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9983242-0-3
Page Count: 242
Publisher: La Mancha Press
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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