House weaves elements of a criminal thriller into his story of a gay man's search for identity in this follow-up to Bruiser, which gets off to a rousing start when protagonist Ian Proctor gets evicted from the London flat he shares with his erstwhile friends Malcolm and Gordon. Insult quickly follows eviction when Ian loses his job as a rent collector, and Malcolm's accidental fall just before the eviction turns suspicious when evidence surfaces that he may have been attacked. The pace of the novel slows and turns romantic when Ian takes a job as a bike messenger and finds himself falling for a co-worker named Peter. But when the police continue to press Ian about Malc's accident, he realizes that Gordon, Malc and a friend may have been involved in a rent scam while they were running a side operation peddling pills. Ian's suspicions are frighteningly corroborated when Peter is attacked while the two lovers are out and about in downtown London. When Ian realizes that he was the actual target, he vows to get to the bottom of the rent scam despite Gordon's insistence that Ian's imagination has gone into paranoid overdrive. House is at his best in the early going and down the stretch when he employs a combination of taut prose and plenty of twists and turns to keep both his readers and Ian guessing as events unfold. The romantic sections involving Ian's brief trysts with Peter lean toward the generic, though, and overall, House can't quite pull off the intriguing genre blend despite a number of effective and engaging passages. (June)
Forecast:Prominently displayed praise from David Sedaris will get browsers to pick up this novel, but readers expecting Sedaris-style humor will be in for a surprise.
