This absorbing double mystery, the third book in Thornton’s Dom Reilly 1990s-set Southern California private eye series, finds protagonist Dom, now working at the Freedom Agenda, a nonprofit striving to exonerate the wrongly convicted. Dom’s current case: trying to get a new trial and present freshly discovered evidence proving the innocence of Larry Wilkes, in prison for the 1976 murder of his boyfriend, Pete Michaels. Meanwhile, attorney Edwin Karpinski asks Dom to investigate an even colder case: the 1949 murder of Vera Korenko, who was the fiancée of Edwin’s uncle Patrick Gill, who in the novel’s present is suffering from dementia and confined to an elder home. In classic gumshoe fashion, Dom’s investigations lead him to a variety of sources and suspects across class and cultures, with emphasis on queer lifestyles—complete with flashbacks conjuring the feelings of escape and fear pervading underground gay bars in the late 1940s. As the two mysteries unravel, Dom of course finds himself in danger, as Thornton strings together the separate mysteries with great skill, keeping the progress in both on an even keel. The pacing is somewhat relaxed, but the story and characters remain intriguing throughout, a pleasure to spend time with, with the scenes set in the post-war era, when being gay was a crime and exposure could lead to wrenching professional and personal consequences, as compelling as those in Dom’s present. Apart from Vera, Gigi, Patrick and his lover Ivan, Rocky Havoc, Dom himself and his partner Ronnie Chen are characters who linger in the mind.
The teasing unraveling of the mysteries is a pleasure, with engaging shoe-leather work—old newspapers and cassette tapes; femme fatales in Chevy Vegas; a vintage book on the Vera case whose prose Dom disdains. Thornton skillfully portrays miscarriages of justice and the imperative in the past to hide sexuality in the hope of a fair trial, as LGBTQ+ people were stereotyped as prone to crime and depravity. Readers will be eager for more.
Takeaway: Absorbing mystery of exonerations, Hollywood noir, and gay freedom.
Comparable Titles: Michael Nava, Joseph Hansen.
Production grades
Cover: B
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: N/A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A
