The two previous Henry Rios mysteries I had some distance from: I wasn't shunned by my family, and AIDS is no longer the scary death sentence it was in the 80's. But the crisis here—powerful religious bigotry driving a societal turn toward homophobic public policies—is once again gaining energy, as strong now as it was then, perhaps stronger.

This isn't Thom Rivera's best performance. While the line readings are flawless and the story proceeds smoothly, his repertoire of character voices seems a little narrow here. Not a reason to stop listening, but I hope for a bit more variety in the next book. ( )

CW: AIDS, homophobia

Michael Nava's Henry Rios mystery series is new to me—and, based on this title, I'm going to be ploughing through every bit of it available as soon as possible. Nava has won numerous awards for this series, which is set in the 1980s and features a gay Chicano defense attorney. Rios works in Los Angeles, picking up public defender cases as he builds his own practice.

If you have any sense of recent history, the intersection of 80s and gay will bring up all kinds of memories, many of them infuriating and agonizing: the onset of the AIDS epidemic, the way the disease enabled homophobes and religious bigots, the beginnings of organizations like Act Up and the underground networks smuggling not-yet-FDA-approved drugs into the U.S. to make them accessible to people with AIDS, law enforcement hostility to the queer community, and struggles over issues of race and gender within that community. In 1986, California's Proposition 64, which would have required reporting of AIDS infections and established a quarantine system for those testing positive, was rejected by voters. Nava uses a fictionalized version of that ballot initiative, Proposition 54, as the starting place for this novel.

I don't want to say too much about the plot except that if you were in California in the 80s the cast of characters will be familiar and the relationships among them are every bit as complex and ugly in Lies with Man as they were in real life. Depending on your experiences during that time, this novel may strike you as cathartic or unbearable. I appreciated a novel featuring a gay man who was fighting the injustices of his time—but these injustices were real and left hundreds of thousands dead, and those who lived through that time and lost lovers, friends, and community members may want to get to know Henry Rios through one of Nava's other titles.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via EdelweissPlus; the opinions are my own. ( )