Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
The fourth installment in Rosen's series featuring gay ex-cop turned private investigator Evander Mills (after Rough Pages) marries the rousing action of a well-built procedural with fascinating tidbits of queer history. In 1950s San Francisco, an anxious member of the local chapter of the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights organizations, comes to Mills's office above a gay bar and asks him to track down three members who've stopped attending meetings following a rift within the national organization. Evander heads to his hometown of L.A. to check out the group's new headquarters and look into a secret gay biker club's possible involvement with the case. Once there, he's unable to avoid his estranged mother, whose new nursing job seems to be tied up in the investigation. Rosen has a blast toying with the conventions of L.A. noir, but this is more than pale Raymond Chandler pastiche--it's a smart, gimmick-free puzzle that stands on its own. The real magic, though, is in Rosen's depiction of the struggles and triumphs of midcentury queer life: he highlights pockets of LGBTQ+ resilience, including Evander's San Francisco community and emergent gay subcultures in L.A., without painting the past in too rosy a light. This series deserves a long life. (Oct.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In Rosen's fourth 1950s San Francisco-set Evander Mills mystery (after Rough Pages), PI Evander "Andy" Mills must track down three people who have abruptly stopped attending the meetings of a secret gay-rights society. Are they okay, or did something happen to them? All signs point to events occurring in Los Angeles. Andy wonders if he can go there and avoid seeing his mother, who works as a nurse at a swanky private clinic; mother and son are only sporadically in touch. Andy has slowly been coming to terms with being a gay man, and telling the truth to his mother is a key step that he's not quite ready for; he might never be ready. Naturally, his mother ends up playing an important role in his investigations. Rosen has set this series during a difficult time for LGBTQIA+ people and pulls no punches in his depiction of the harsh realities of the era, including a disturbing scene of conversion therapy. As with earlier series entries, character development and worldbuilding take center stage. VERDICT Should appeal to fans of Cat Sebastian and KJ Charles and those who enjoy a gritty noir detective story with an appealing protagonist.--Laurel Bliss
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Queer San Francisco PI Evander "Andy" Mills returns to his hometown of Los Angeles in 1953 to solve a mystery that cuts uncomfortably close to the bone. Myrtle Bolton is concerned that three fellow members of her local chapter of the real-life Mattachine Society have vanished. The Society, dedicated to normalizing homosexuality by persuading its members to act as straight as possible apart from their sex lives, is so fanatical about preserving its members' privacy that Myrtle knows the missing only as boyfriends Edward and Hank and singleton Daphne, who disappeared a few weeks later. Nor does she have any photographs of them or background information about them. It seems an impossible job, but it's right up Andy's alley. Maybe even a little bit too much up his alley, for the few leads he unearths take him past the Fifth Order, an altogether more radical group Edward violently opposed, to the Bacchanal, the gay LA motorcycle club Hank's rumored to have joined, and the North Private Clinic, where one of the nurses is Mary Mills, the mother Andy hasn't seen in seven years. Mary's delighted to see her son again, however unexpectedly, but Andy's awkward squirming becomes ever more frantic, first because he's never come out to his mother, and then when he finds out exactly what kind of work the North Private Clinic is doing with its all-male clientele. Although the mystery isn't as strong as the one inRough Pages (2024), the unsparing descriptions of aversive conversion therapy and Andy's agonized attempts to come to terms with the many warring sexual communities around him more than compensate. Required reading for anyone who wonders what it was like to be queer before Stonewall. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
