โ Scribed by Nava, Michael
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
Henry Rios is introduced as a troubled San Francisco public defender battling alcoholism and burnout. While investigating the murder of an old friend, he traces clues back to the mans own wealthy family. It is here that we first encounter Henry Rioss struggle to maintain his faith in a legal system caught between justice and corruption, a theme that will continue throughout the series.
This murder mystery about a gay public defender in the San Francisco area is distinguished by good writing and by skillful adaptation of the genre's traditions. Lawyer Henry Rios's loyalty to wealthy wastrel Hugh Paris, with whom he once had a brief affair, strongly recalls the male bonding in Raymond Chandler's classic The Long Goodbye. In both there is a sense of the protagonist as a lost soul trying to justify another person's existence and thereby his own. Through legal documents as much as police work, Rios tracks the murder's clues back to Hugh's family and its conflicts between old money and opportunists, both so greedy and eager to control the family fortune that they will sanction any form of legal trickery, corruption, even murder. Particularly striking is Nava's vision of the legal system as a true instrument of justiceignoring distinctions of position, wealth or sexual preference.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Michael Nava is the author of seven Henry Rios novels, five of which (Goldenboy, Howtown, The Hidden Law, The Death of Friends, and Rag and Bone) have been Lambda Literary Award winners. He is an attorney in private practice in San Francisco.
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