Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A dead young hustler is found on the lawn of a queer-baiting legislator. Boston's political and queer communities are up in arms about the matter, and police are bent on finding the killer—fast. Best friends Daniel Valentine and Clarisse Lovelace team up and hit the streets of Boston. Through a sinister underworld of bars and baths, bondage and blackmail, they're out to solve a very bizarre murder.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Four w-bombs. It was 1981 and there was no need to torment me from beyond the grave! It was a tough enough year as it was.

Anyway. First, read this:

"I tell you, Lieutenant: twenty-five years ago, it was straight men that got me into trouble, and ten years ago, it was straight men that got me put in jail. It was a fag that got me out of jail and it was a fag that made sure I got a decent job. I got nothing against 'em. I'm not a fag, but I know what they know"—he gestured just as {the Lieutenant} had, with a cocked head—"that straight men are just trouble."
–and–
"...Wednesday night is dollar night and every queen in town with four quarters to her name shows up...that lobby emptied out like they were showing Dark Victory across the street...I'm not afraid of {the Lieutenant} for that, because I can take care of myself, and the time is past somebody like him can come in and push me around just because I'm gay. No judge in town would listen to him for more than five minutes. But like I say, it's the hassle. I don't like having to carry around {his lawyer's} card in my wallet all the time, and I certainly don't like the man coming around flashing his badge."

That, mes vieux, is the way we talked in 1979 when this story is set. It was pre-AIDS and the second quotes are from a bath-house attendant, though it's not like the institution of anonymous semi-public sex has vanished from the landscape (see: [Bath Haus])) it is a lot less prominent. A lot of things I thought were in the past, like homophobic politicians trying to keep QUILTBAG people down, aren't. But we have fought and fought and fought since the mid-nineteenth century to keep straight people out of our business and away from our basic rights to exist, to speak, to love and marry...so we just need to keep a-doin' it.

What this book does, by coming out again in the Twenties, is to educate the Millennials on the fact that the Boomers were just horny guys, too. The pop-culture references...Mamie Van Doren, Veronica Lake the afghan hound, handkerchief codes, smoking!! boozing!!, calling men who dress up as ladies "drags" and "a drag," the über-fey hairdresser whose professional name, nay entire beauty shop!, takes its names and inspiration from Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past (which is what we called it then)...are going to be challenging for anyone under 50. My Young Gentleman Caller was...confused...a lot, and kept asking "But WHY is it funny?" So, well, audience defined.

But if it's in your frames of reference, if you're just a weentsy tidge nostalgic one reading day, pick this up and try it.

"Honey, I just got a pistol fired at my face!" She shoved the leather envelope under her arm. "In the immortal words of Mildred Pierce, 'Let's get stinko!'"

Let's!

It's $1.99 at the Kindle store: Follow the non-affiliate link! ( )

A rent boy's body is dumped in the grounds of a homophobic Boston politician's home. Under pressure from the politico, the police seem determined to pin the murder on someone, anyone, from the local gay community. Bartender Valentine and his BFF Clarisse Lovelace decide to find the real killer.

Fun piece of froth from 1980, so set in a very different world in so many ways. ( )

Murder mystery in which a gay hustler is killed in Boston. The plot involves a property broker and a gay bartender who are best friends who are investigating the murder. The bartender and some others in the gay business community are getting leaned on by a local cop. Is so so as far a story goes. It truly is a mystery til near the end of the book as to whom committed the murder with various clues pointing us in different directions. Which ultimately turn out to be red herrings. Some of the characters lean a bit too much on stereotypes, the aging queen who sings in a piano bar, the clones, promiscuous sex that seems to have been more of the time then now. But that being said that it relies on stereotypes it does have a cast of characters, the aging lounge singer, a dominatrix that's always stoned, the promiscuous bartender, the "overworked" property broker. I read this series a number of years ago and am re-reading now. We'll have to see how the rest of the series holds up. ( )

Ouch. Sometimes the beginning of a series isn't worth stretching for. I had read the fourth (and last) in this series and liked it well enough. Two amateur sleuths in Boston in the 1980s were entertaining, so I thought I'd see how the series started. My advice - don't. Overwritten, oversexed, over-stereotyped. As someone, I think Suzanne, says, a tree died for this. ( )