The Truth Can Get You Killed

Gay Chicago police detective Paul Turner makes his fourth appearance (following Rust on the Razor, 1996) in a mystery that focuses as much on the difficulties of being gay in a straight world as it does on the murder of federal judge Albert Meade. Ironically, the homophobic judge's body is found in a dumpster near a gay strip bar. Turner and his straight partner, Buck Fenwick, catch the call on a frigid New Year's Day. When a frightened witness places Judge Meade in Au Naturel, the hottest gay bar in Chicago, shortly before his death, the cops have a three-pronged investigation on their hands--family, work associates and, perhaps, the ultimate closet case. Exploring Meade's strained relations with his son, Mike, and with his fellow judges and trying to determine how he came to be in Au Naturel, Paul and Buck encounter every degree of ""outedness"" from the completely closeted to the totally open. Paul's own position--he neither hides nor parades his homosexuality--is the prism that refracts this spectrum. As he does in his Tom & Scott series, Zubro spends nearly as much effort making obvious political points as he does laying out a mystery. But from a suicidal, abused teenage runaway to the proud editor of the Gay Tribune, he paints a compelling background against which his cops conduct a competent investigation. (Aug.)