Little Death (Old Edition)

This murder mystery about a gay public defender in the San Francisco area is distinguished by good writing and by skillful adaptation of the genre's traditions. Lawyer Henry Rios's loyalty to wealthy wastrel Hugh Paris, with whom he once had a brief affair, strongly recalls the male bonding in Raymond Chandler's classic The Long Goodbye. In both there is a sense of the protagonist as a lost soul trying to justify another person's existence and thereby his own. Through legal documents as much as police work, Rios tracks the murder's clues back to Hugh's family and its conflicts between old money and opportunists, both so greedy and eager to control the family fortune that they will sanction any form of legal trickery, corruption, even murder. Particularly striking is Nava's vision of the legal system as a true instrument of justiceignoring distinctions of position, wealth or sexual preference. (March)