Lay Your Sleeping Head: A Henry Rios Mystery

Fans of Nava’s first Henry Rios mystery, 1986’s The Little Death, will welcome this revised, updated version, which includes sexually explicit passages not in the original novel. In 1982, Henry, a gay Latino, quits his job as a public defender in the San Francisco Bay Area town of Linden, home to the “great university of the same name,” because he has lost faith in justice. Soon afterward, he meets Hugh Paris, a gay, drug-addicted scion of a wealthy white family; Hugh’s great-great-grandfather founded Linden University. The untrustworthy Hugh is in legal trouble, but the two men fall in love. When Hugh dies of an overdose, Henry believes that his lover was murdered and sets out to prove it. His investigation includes looking into Hugh’s claims that his paternal grandfather, a retired federal judge, was a murderer and rapist. He’s assisted by Grant Hancock, an old friend of Hugh’s with whom Henry also gets romantically involved. Nava dramatically highlights the racism and homophobia of 1980s America. [em](Dec.) [/em]