In these reviews of the first three titles in the series, Jilles reveals why he loves Michael Nava and his Henry Rios Mysteries so much.
Enjoy!
Lay Your Sleeping Head by Michael Nava and Michael Hames-García
Henry Rios, a gifted and humane lawyer driven to drink by professional failure and personal demons, meets a charming junky struggling to stay clean. He tells Rios an improbable tale of long-ago murders in his wealthy family. Rios is skeptical, but the erotic spark between them ignites an obsessive affair that ends only when the man’s body is discovered with a needle in his arm on the campus of a great California university. Rios refuses to believe his lover’s death was an accidental overdose.
An amazing book from a writer whom I have missed dearly since he stopped writing Henry Rios novels. Nava has done an amazing job in re-imagining his first novel The Little Death.
There is nothing more powerful that reading something that gives words and meaning to things inside of you that you never found the words for yourself to explain, or that express a deeper layer inside you. As a writer he uses words like a poet. That, together with a great, entertaining story, makes this one of the greatest books I have read in a long time.
Carved in Bone by Michael Nava
November, 1984. Criminal defense lawyer Henry Rios, fresh out of rehab and picking up the pieces of his life, reluctantly accepts work as an insurance claims investigator and is immediately assigned to investigate the apparently accidental death of Bill Ryan. Ryan, part of the great gay migration into San Francisco in the 1970s, has died in his flat of carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty gas line, his young lover barely surviving.
This is a beautiful novel, a prequel to the Henry Rios gay crime series. It is about the slow destruction of a gay man and about Henry, who is just out of rehab trying to rebuild his life.
Even though the two story lines are unfolding at different times, they keep crossing each other to tell one story about dying or surviving in the early eighties when the AIDS epidemic started.
Besides crime, this book is about the beginning of the AIDS crisis and the horrors it brought upon the gay community.
Los Angeles, 1986.
A group of right-wing Christians has put an initiative on the November ballot to allow health officials to force people with HIV into quarantine camps – and it looks like it’s going to pass. Rios, now living in LA, agrees to be counsel for a group of young activists who call themselves QUEER [Queers United to End Erasure and Repression]. QUEER claims to be committed to peaceful civil disobedience. But when one of its members is implicated in the bombing of an evangelical church that kills its pastor, who publicly supported the quarantine initiative, Rios finds himself with a client suddenly facing the death penalty.
The amazing Michael Nava is back with another Henry Rios crime novel, that starts with
Actually it is his second book in the series that he has rewritten and the book is so much better for it. It is still set in Los Angeles 1986 and lawyer Rios is up against a group of right-wing Christians who have put an initiative on the ballot to allow health officials to force people with HIV into quarantine camps.
The book reads between a noir detective and a regular novel, and Rios is one of the few characters you can’t help falling in love with. The writing by Nava is amazing, there is not an unauthentic word in his books.
Five stars!
