FATAL SHADOWS, twenty years of hooking in new readers

FATAL SHADOWS
JOSH LANYON
Just Joshin'
$5.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five, with minor reservations

The Publisher Says: One sunny morning Los Angeles bookseller and aspiring mystery author Adrien English opens his front door to murder. His old high school buddy (and employee) has been found stabbed to death in a back alley following a loud and very public argument with Adrien the previous evening.

Naturally the cops want to ask Adrien a few questions; they are none too impressed with his answers, and when a few hours later someone breaks into Adrien's shop and ransacks it, the law is inclined to think Adrien is trying to divert suspicion from himself.

Adrien knows better. Adrien knows he is next on the killer's list.

I GOT THIS BOOK ON A 20TH ANNIVERSARY PROMOTION!

My Review: This groundbreaking series started in 2000 at the late, very lamented Gay Men's Press, when there was a great deal less M/M fiction around.

In a lot of ways, that fact explains the unquestioning acceptance of the M/M audience of Jake's waffling about Adrien, for whom he clearly has a lot of feelings...even if he doesn't want to come right out and say so for quite a long time. This approach/avoidance dynamic doesn't play the same way it did in 2000. We'd probably call it "queerbaiting" today, and it really makes me personally feel squirmy, but I totally grandfather this book in under the "the past is a foreign country" rubric. I don't think being lenient with an artifact of a bygone era is always a mistake; more especially so when it's something as influntial as this book and series were in that barely-rememberable time.

I confess that, had the prose been less fun to read, I might be harsher. Author Lanyon is justly celebrated for her skill with dialogue. Funny when that's what the story needs:

“Just shut up and listen.”

“Well, since you ask so nicely...”

There was silence. I listened. He didn’t say anything.

“Are we communicating through the Psychic Hotline or what?”
–and–
“Drink your coffee—people in Africa are sleeping.”

...quietly intense in other moods:

I dug out the powder blue cashmere cardigan my mother Lisa gave me the Christmas before last, pulled on my oldest, softest Levi’s. Comfort clothes; the next best thing to a hug from a warm, living body. Lately there had been a shortage of hugs in my life. Lately there had been a shortage of warm, living bodies.
–and–
“Everything a gay man does makes a political statement. Everything matters: where you bank, where you shop, where you eat. When you hold your lover’s hand in public.”

Some verities are eternal, or so it seems....

What the reader gets by turning on this time machine is a hit of funny, a soupçon of sexy, a helping of gay awakening, wrapped in a pretty darn interesting mystery. I would have LOVED to see this as a TV series in the Aughties or the Teens; now, I just don't think it'd play that well. Not that I wouldn't sample it! But my hopes wouldn't be high.

The price of experiencing things after their time. Still, a very worthwhile read indeed.