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The novel opens by giving us a glimpse of an unidentified member of a US based right-wing vigilante group that is intent on taking out human targets who violate the group's standards of moral purity. Curiously, he uses James Joyce's ULYSSES, itself the target of many obscenity charges, as the basis for the group's coded talk. This particular member has been charged with bringing down gay men. Ironically, we are presented with evidence that the man himself is a deep, deep closet case. Thus begins the sequel to the author's MURDER IN THE MONASHEES (2005). Throughout the novel we are kept abreast of much of what the bad guys are up to and what they stumble onto about the course of the police investigation into their activities. But not till near the end do we tumble to who the figure behind their actions is. All the central characters from the earlier novel show up. This time, however, instead of being in the rural backwaters of Bear Creek, we are mostly in Vancouver. Five gays from the West End have been murdered with no leads suggesting why these particular five were singled out. Whatever the reason, Inspector Mark Coswell is convinced that the gay mayor of San Francisco, due shortly in town to attend a Pacific Coast conference on urban renewal, is the ultimate target. Coswell intends to find the perpetrators first. Enter Lt Paul Blakemore, just transferred to Vancouver from Bear Creek. Never mind that he is a most unlikely candidate to pose as a gay guy, Coswell sets him up to go undercover on the grounds that he is new to the area and therefore unknown. Luckily, Blakemore's former constable, Ernie Downs, has left the Bear Creek RCMP unit to come out of the closet and begin managing an art gallery in the heart of the West End. Downs becomes an indispensable source of information and the one finally to solve why these particular five were chosen as targets. Also joining them from Bear Creek is a feisty journalist who has likewise taken a new job in Vancouver. Heather McTavish once again plays an important role in bringing the killer to some sort of justice. New to the series is Detective Sgt Burns, who provides a degree of comic relief as he tries to cope with Coswell's sometimes strange demands. Cowell dominates the novel. After a failed operation that leaves two hired guns dead, he follows a crooked trail by way of San Francisco to California's capital city of Sacramento. (For American readers there comes the added pleasure of getting a Canadian perspective on post 9/11 USA.) In San Francisco, Coswell meets two rather off-putting federal agents – one from the FBI, the other from the CIA – and a very attractive and very professional SFPD officer, Capt. Cindy Forsythe. She fascinates the Canadian. Coswell is a bon vivant. He enjoys good food; he especially appreciates fine wines. His epicurism proves to be his salvation. At the climax of the novel, he first thinks that it was "the grace of God" that averts total tragedy: "And then he began to smile. It wasn't God and goodness. It was sin . . . . Coswell's sin: gluttony. If God was involved, the great Jehovah had one peculiar sense of humour." The author, a retired eye surgeon, appends a series of notes to the end of his novel. There he explains that the sequel came about because of reader demand, but that he felt the need to put his characters in a new setting and therefore settled on "the antithesis of outback Bear Creek." The move vaguely troubles me. It is curious that what can happen in real life sometimes seems contrived in fiction. I do enjoy getting to learn more about Inspector Coswell, but both Blakemore and Downs seem less vivid out of their rural setting. I particularly miss seeing Downs in a larger role. In the first novel he provided a sense of sanity among all the horrors; here, despite his intimate knowledge, he seems almost peripheral. In an email exchange after the first novel, I mused to Dr Innes that straight authors who create gay characters often portray them as some center of stability for the straight characters, I'm not sure why. In response, he told me how his Vancouver office had been adjacent to West End with many of his patients being gay men. He then elaborated, "I observed gay life as exciting, open, creative, abounding with enthusiasm, energy and, despite the AIDS cloud, humor and wit. This contrasted sharply with my medical academic life, which was full of traditional, rigid, unimaginative individuals who were about as exciting as old socks." According to the notes, the author is working on two non-series novels, but has begun thinking about a third novel in the series, apparently with just Coswell, Blakemore, and Burns. It will be interesting to see how Dr Innis's second career develops.
Reviewed by Drewey Wayne Gunn, October 2008
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