Michael Nava

CW: AIDS, homophobia

Michael Nava's Henry Rios mystery series is new to me—and, based on this title, I'm going to be ploughing through every bit of it available as soon as possible. Nava has won numerous awards for this series, which is set in the 1980s and features a gay Chicano defense attorney. Rios works in Los Angeles, picking up public defender cases as he builds his own practice.

If you have any sense of recent history, the intersection of 80s and gay will bring up all kinds of show more memories, many of them infuriating and agonizing: the onset of the AIDS epidemic, the way the disease enabled homophobes and religious bigots, the beginnings of organizations like Act Up and the underground networks smuggling not-yet-FDA-approved drugs into the U.S. to make them accessible to people with AIDS, law enforcement hostility to the queer community, and struggles over issues of race and gender within that community. In 1986, California's Proposition 64, which would have required reporting of AIDS infections and established a quarantine system for those testing positive, was rejected by voters. Nava uses a fictionalized version of that ballot initiative, Proposition 54, as the starting place for this novel.

I don't want to say too much about the plot except that if you were in California in the 80s the cast of characters will be familiar and the relationships among them are every bit as complex and ugly in Lies with Man as they were in real life. Depending on your experiences during that time, this novel may strike you as cathartic or unbearable. I appreciated a novel featuring a gay man who was fighting the injustices of his time—but these injustices were real and left hundreds of thousands dead, and those who lived through that time and lost lovers, friends, and community members may want to get to know Henry Rios through one of Nava's other titles.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via EdelweissPlus; the opinions are my own. show less

A noiresque quasi-courtroom mystery (no actual courtroom stuff but the MC sleuth is a DA) in which a Latino lawyer falls for a rich-kid-turned-druggie/almost client, who then dies of an overdose, but the circumstances suggest it was actually murder. What follows is the MC’s search for the truth, which in turn unearths all sorts of secrets in the victim’s influential family and all sorts of cover-ups and betrayals result.

Noir is not my usual jam (I don’t love gritty), but I enjoyed the show more MC and the idea of Hammett-but-make-it-gay-and-Latino and a gorgeous twink as the femme fatale character. show less

Tight thriller which makes you want to drop everything and just read. The stakes are extremely high and more than once I wanted to reach into the book and kick someone's ass! The problem? Well, the ending (and "resolution") is so shitty and depressing. The sadistic killer pretty much gets away (not really, but his punishment is slight), the raped kid goes to Jesus, and Josh's parents still hate Rios. One would think that Nava wanted to give us some kind of positive slant, but there's no show more redemption to be had. show less

City of Palaces is one of the best books I've read this year (and I've read and reviewed 118 2020 titles). The novel is set in Mexico City at the turn of the 20th Century. Mexico has ousted the French who had set up their own rules for the country; Porfirio Díaz then became President and remained in office for decades using increasingly corrupt elections; a rebellion led by Madero ousted Díaz; the Madero himself was ousted. Obviously, this was a tumultuous period for Mexico—and the U.S. show more played its own role in the tumult.

The central characters, Miguel Sarmiento and Alicia Gavilán, are both committed to doing good in the world and each has their own tragedy underlying that motivation, but aside from those commonalities, they have little in common. He's the son of a political rebel, who was once respoected, but is now considered insane; she's the daughter of one of Mexico's oldest aristocratic families. He's a scientific rationalist and atheist; she's a devout Catholic. He accomplishes much good as a doctor volunteering in areas of the city where the poorest live, but builds few relationships with the people he serves; she has more friends, and more genuine friends, among the poor than she does among her own class.

Nava does wonders pulling together the sweep of history, the different world views and philosophies embraced by his central characters, and the relationship between those characters. I'm generally not one for "big" novels because they too easily become episodic or didactic. Nava avoids those pitfalls and presents a narrative that provokes thought and engagement.

This is a do-not-miss title for any reader of fiction. Its complexities and insights will reward on many levels.

I received a free electronic ARC of this title from the publisher via EdelweissPlus for review purposes. The opinions are my own. show less