Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0964109956, Paperback)
In 1974, The Front Runner was published, a novel of love and loss that became a best-loved classic about gay life. Now, twenty years later, comes the sequel - a story of passion, and victory pulled from defeat.
After his young athlete lover is assassinated on the Olympic track in Montreal, coach Harlan Brown is forced to enter the race of his life. To survive the hate and violence which threaten his chosen family - Betsy, valiant lesbian mother, Vince, angry activist seeking revenge, Chino, Vietnam vet with a wounded heart, and the secret child of Billy Sive, The Front Runner.
In time, a second chance at love comes. Vince Matti, 25, a runner who was Billy's best friend, has harbored an unrequited passion for his ex-Marine coach. Handsome, volatile, and passionate, Vince challenges Harlan's stoic and lonely heart in unimagined ways. Harlan must race with the shadow of the past - that memory of the brief idyll with Billy - and reach a present where love is enduring and real.
Meanwhile, Harlan's ordeal with bias and bloodshed is not over. Snipers often work in pairs, and the Montreal shooter evidently had a cohort who escaped arrest. This mysterious stalker moves implacably into Harlan's world. And yet another stalker is moving into gay life - a disease that has no name. As events move to the climax, Harlan runs the most desperate race of his life - risking everything to win the victory torn from his hands at Montreal.
(retrieved from Amazon Sun, 13 Jan 2013 06:09:59 -0500)
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Wikipedia in English (2)
1
We follow the arrival of Billy's son along with the lives of those closest to Harlan, including his two other young runners Vince and Jacques. His two bodyguards Harry and Chino are still with him, as are Steve Goodnight and his young protégé the damaged Angel, and many others.
Harlan is now being plagued by a mystery stalker believed to be the partner of the sniper who took out Billy, and the threat seems to extend to those closest to him, but another unseen stalker is at large, a killer that appears indiscriminately to be targeting gay men and whose identity will not begin to become recognised until the early 1980s; while Harlan and his gay bodyguards grapple with the problem of his own tormentor, he will see many of his friends claimed by this other dark mystery.
As for his love life, Harlan finds himself pursued now by Vince, but Vince is as volatile as ever, and they seem unable to hold onto one another. At the same time Harlan finds himself drawn by Chino, but Chino has his own troubled past to deal with and has problems making a commitment.
Harlan's Race is a worthy successor to the Front Runner, while it might appear at times to be without any real direction it says much for the power of the characters PNW has created that out attention is held simply following their interactions. However the story does build steadily towards the inevitable showdown and the stalkers revealing, and to a satisfying conclusion tinged with the sadness of what has been lost along the way. (