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kateycakee's review
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
norwayellesea's review
5.0
When criminal defence lawyer Henry Dios accepts an offer to work as an insurance claims investigator, he does so begrudgingly. Fresh out of rehab with little work available and bills to pay, the job is a necessity, not a choice. However, when he's assigned to investigate the accidental death of Bill Ryan who lived in the heart of the San Francisco gay community, his findings are not only shocking but a reminder to himself of his own predicaments.
The narrative is split between Henry's life in the present, his personal demons and trying to get his life back on track. Then there's Bill Ryan's life history leading up to his tragic death. Similarities between the two men are exposed; their concerns and insecurities during this volatile time in history. Additionally, likeable and fascinating secondary characters playing important roles in both the men's lives are present along with a twisty plot exposing the unexpected.
This novel is so much more than a crime noir novel. The author's ability to convey the setting with sincerity is palpable. He expresses the emotions and concerns of the gay community during the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s with raw sensitivity. When I look back at this era, I remember the Rock Hudson scandal and the hysteria in the press. Therefore Mr Nava's detailed account of life in San Francisco at this time is equally fascinating and sobering.
The ending is poignant and thought-provoking leaving me, with a greater understanding and a desire to continue getting to know more about Henry Dios.
***arc received courtesy of Persigo Press via Rachel's Random Resources***
The narrative is split between Henry's life in the present, his personal demons and trying to get his life back on track. Then there's Bill Ryan's life history leading up to his tragic death. Similarities between the two men are exposed; their concerns and insecurities during this volatile time in history. Additionally, likeable and fascinating secondary characters playing important roles in both the men's lives are present along with a twisty plot exposing the unexpected.
This novel is so much more than a crime noir novel. The author's ability to convey the setting with sincerity is palpable. He expresses the emotions and concerns of the gay community during the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s with raw sensitivity. When I look back at this era, I remember the Rock Hudson scandal and the hysteria in the press. Therefore Mr Nava's detailed account of life in San Francisco at this time is equally fascinating and sobering.
The ending is poignant and thought-provoking leaving me, with a greater understanding and a desire to continue getting to know more about Henry Dios.
***arc received courtesy of Persigo Press via Rachel's Random Resources***
tangleroot_eli's review
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
I hate to say it, but this is my least favorite Henry Rios novel so far. iirc, the others are solely from Henry's POV. This one intersperses chapters of Henry now, investigating Bill's death (while moonlighting as an insurance investigator, a nice nod to <a href="https://crimereads.com/joseph-hanson-dave-brandstetter/">the Dave Brandstetter mysteries</a>) with chapters of Bill "then," from just before his arrival in San Francisco to just before his death.
It's not a bad impulse on Nava's part, wanting to show more of who Bill was before he became a death for Henry to investigate (especially as his life revolves around two major chapters in US gay history that a lot of us no longer remember well or weren't around for - the gaytrification of the Castro and the early, horrific days of the AIDS epidemic). But one of the great pleasures of the rest of the series was riding shotgun with Henry, learning things as he learned them, trying as he did to sort fact from fiction, personal truth from societally-imposed bias. I felt like being handed so much of Bill's life outside of Henry's investigation robbed me of some of the joy of discovery.
It's not a bad impulse on Nava's part, wanting to show more of who Bill was before he became a death for Henry to investigate (especially as his life revolves around two major chapters in US gay history that a lot of us no longer remember well or weren't around for - the gaytrification of the Castro and the early, horrific days of the AIDS epidemic). But one of the great pleasures of the rest of the series was riding shotgun with Henry, learning things as he learned them, trying as he did to sort fact from fiction, personal truth from societally-imposed bias. I felt like being handed so much of Bill's life outside of Henry's investigation robbed me of some of the joy of discovery.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Homophobia, Violence, Medical content, Sexual content, and Death
Moderate: Abandonment, Suicide, Sexual violence, Biphobia, Rape, Alcoholism, and Alcohol
trish33's review against another edition
dark
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.75
beblackbeloved's review
4.0
1984, San Francisco. Henry Rios, a gay criminal defense attorney and newly recovering alcoholic begins working as a death claims investigator for an insurance company. His first case, the mysterious death of Billy Ryan. This takes us back to 1971, when Billy's father stumbles upon him with a close male friend. After being beaten half to death, he is sent away with nothing but a small envelope with $200, and a suitcase. Billy chooses to head to San Francisco.
Michael Nava really does something magical with this story. Weaving in characters who were in the backdrop of Billy's past within Henry's present. Discussing alcoholism, acceptance, and even queer intimate partner violence. Recollections of the early years of the AIDS crisis convey the way the fear, the pain of watching friends and chosen family dying with little explanation, but most of all the will to continue living and loving.
I wish this was longer, I desperately wanted more. I needed to hear Waldo & Eddie's story. Eddie most of all deserved more. Speaking as a Black reader, it felt like the few Black characters were the 'angry' and non-accepting ones (Eddie's wife, the mention of the black man discriminating against Henry when he was his attorney), and Eddie was fetishized. The discussion of race was definitely 'of the time'. Nava hasn't published a new book in this series since '01, so this in an area that I'm hoping he works on.
But overall, this mystery was a real page turner. A great fall/winter read.
Michael Nava really does something magical with this story. Weaving in characters who were in the backdrop of Billy's past within Henry's present. Discussing alcoholism, acceptance, and even queer intimate partner violence. Recollections of the early years of the AIDS crisis convey the way the fear, the pain of watching friends and chosen family dying with little explanation, but most of all the will to continue living and loving.
I wish this was longer, I desperately wanted more. I needed to hear Waldo & Eddie's story. Eddie most of all deserved more. Speaking as a Black reader, it felt like the few Black characters were the 'angry' and non-accepting ones (Eddie's wife, the mention of the black man discriminating against Henry when he was his attorney), and Eddie was fetishized. The discussion of race was definitely 'of the time'. Nava hasn't published a new book in this series since '01, so this in an area that I'm hoping he works on.
But overall, this mystery was a real page turner. A great fall/winter read.
kaje_harper's review
5.0
Michael Nava is one of my favorite gay mystery writers. I read the original series when it came out back in the 1980s and fell in love with Henry Rios, with his honor, his intelligence, his fierce need to find the truth and see justice done, his drinking, his flaws, his strained family past, and all the parts that make up this amazing, gay, Hispanic lawyer and crusader. So a new Henry Rios story after all this time is a gift.
This book slots in after the first story in the series ([b:The Little Death|17347222|The Little Death (Henry Rios Mystery, #1)|Michael Nava|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1361314033l/17347222._SY75_.jpg|1071848] which has now been rewritten as [b:Lay Your Sleeping Head|33790571|Lay Your Sleeping Head (The Henry Rios Novels)|Michael Nava|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1483510363l/33790571._SY75_.jpg|54681890] ) - here we see Henry after he has hit bottom with his drinking and his losses, managing to finally get help. He's trying to rebuild his life. Unable to drum up enough criminal defense cases to pay the rent, he takes up insurance claim work. His first assignment is a gay man dead of a gas leak in the apartment he shared with his lover. The lover, Nick, who was the beneficiary, has vanished, and Henry needs to find him, confirm that the death was accidental, and sign off on the payment. But Nick turns out to be elusive in different ways, the dead man had a difficult past, and this may not be a simple accidental death.
The Henry portion of this story is set in the late 1980s as the AIDS crisis began to really take hold in San Francisco, which along with New York City was ground zero for the gay plague and the devastation it worked on a generation of gay men. The death of Bill, a gay man in his thirties, by accident has a different poignancy set alongside the deaths of so many young gay men from the horrible workings of a disease that was still not well understood. Testing has become available, but as lover after friend is lost, there's a fatalistic mood where every man assumes he's probably positive, mixed with deep anger at the cruelty of fate and society.
And most tellingly and clearly in this story, there is the impact of AIDS on a generation just beginning to believe that their families and churches and authorities were wrong about gay being unnatural and evil. How do you begin to purge that internalized shame and self-disgust from your soul, when God seems to be striking down gay man after gay man with the most horrific suffering? When the more sex a guy has had, the higher his risk? When everything about this plague seems designed to confirm that gay men are miserable sinners unfit for love, undeserving of life?
Half of the book is the story of the dead man - Bill. He comes to San Francisco in the 1970s, exiled from his family, after his father finds him with another boy and beats him hard enough to almost kill him. At eighteen, Bill is terrified, naive, with one interrupted blow-job the extent of his gay experience. He's the product of his upraising, a romantic who wants one lover and a house and picket fence life. He also has a deep well of self-hate inside him. We watch him learn about being gay from the funhouse mirror that is The Castro, from committed gay couples buying homes together, to the rent boys and gay bars and bath houses and underworld, and then the tide of AIDS breaking across that community.
The mystery is a good one. When I thought I had a handle on how things happened, I was surprised again by little twists that open up both the events and the psychology of the participants. The end was satisfying, and real, and poignant.
The context is even better. This book is lest-we-forget reading, and I'd like to see young people read this series for the immersive effect it has on understanding gay history. Like the picture of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus, with the black figures of men lost to AIDS dominating the image, this book is a little gut punch of remembrance and loss, an inside look at how those years impacted a generation. (The series, perforce for its time and setting, carries this sub-theme forward through several of the mysteries - all good reading.)
And yet the story is also positive, and hopeful. Henry is surviving despite all the things pulling him down. He's living with purpose, fighting a good fight against his addiction, despite the sword of his possible HIV status after years of unsafe sex hanging over his head. He has a good friend, and is brilliant and dogged at his job. Death may be stalking The Castro, but people are living their lives despite that.
This series is highly recommended, a multiple reread for me. I picked up the first book revision immediately and dove into it, reminded of how much I like Henry. (Without looking back, I think that the new version is both smoother and more explicit than the original - unsurprisingly since on-page gay sex was far less acceptable in the 1980s.) If you haven't yet encountered Henry Rios, I recommend starting with book 1 - [b:Lay Your Sleeping Head|33790571|Lay Your Sleeping Head (The Henry Rios Novels)|Michael Nava|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1483510363l/33790571._SY75_.jpg|54681890], but this one could stand alone as a first time read.
This book slots in after the first story in the series ([b:The Little Death|17347222|The Little Death (Henry Rios Mystery, #1)|Michael Nava|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1361314033l/17347222._SY75_.jpg|1071848] which has now been rewritten as [b:Lay Your Sleeping Head|33790571|Lay Your Sleeping Head (The Henry Rios Novels)|Michael Nava|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1483510363l/33790571._SY75_.jpg|54681890] ) - here we see Henry after he has hit bottom with his drinking and his losses, managing to finally get help. He's trying to rebuild his life. Unable to drum up enough criminal defense cases to pay the rent, he takes up insurance claim work. His first assignment is a gay man dead of a gas leak in the apartment he shared with his lover. The lover, Nick, who was the beneficiary, has vanished, and Henry needs to find him, confirm that the death was accidental, and sign off on the payment. But Nick turns out to be elusive in different ways, the dead man had a difficult past, and this may not be a simple accidental death.
The Henry portion of this story is set in the late 1980s as the AIDS crisis began to really take hold in San Francisco, which along with New York City was ground zero for the gay plague and the devastation it worked on a generation of gay men. The death of Bill, a gay man in his thirties, by accident has a different poignancy set alongside the deaths of so many young gay men from the horrible workings of a disease that was still not well understood. Testing has become available, but as lover after friend is lost, there's a fatalistic mood where every man assumes he's probably positive, mixed with deep anger at the cruelty of fate and society.
And most tellingly and clearly in this story, there is the impact of AIDS on a generation just beginning to believe that their families and churches and authorities were wrong about gay being unnatural and evil. How do you begin to purge that internalized shame and self-disgust from your soul, when God seems to be striking down gay man after gay man with the most horrific suffering? When the more sex a guy has had, the higher his risk? When everything about this plague seems designed to confirm that gay men are miserable sinners unfit for love, undeserving of life?
Half of the book is the story of the dead man - Bill. He comes to San Francisco in the 1970s, exiled from his family, after his father finds him with another boy and beats him hard enough to almost kill him. At eighteen, Bill is terrified, naive, with one interrupted blow-job the extent of his gay experience. He's the product of his upraising, a romantic who wants one lover and a house and picket fence life. He also has a deep well of self-hate inside him. We watch him learn about being gay from the funhouse mirror that is The Castro, from committed gay couples buying homes together, to the rent boys and gay bars and bath houses and underworld, and then the tide of AIDS breaking across that community.
The mystery is a good one. When I thought I had a handle on how things happened, I was surprised again by little twists that open up both the events and the psychology of the participants. The end was satisfying, and real, and poignant.
The context is even better. This book is lest-we-forget reading, and I'd like to see young people read this series for the immersive effect it has on understanding gay history. Like the picture of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus, with the black figures of men lost to AIDS dominating the image, this book is a little gut punch of remembrance and loss, an inside look at how those years impacted a generation. (The series, perforce for its time and setting, carries this sub-theme forward through several of the mysteries - all good reading.)
And yet the story is also positive, and hopeful. Henry is surviving despite all the things pulling him down. He's living with purpose, fighting a good fight against his addiction, despite the sword of his possible HIV status after years of unsafe sex hanging over his head. He has a good friend, and is brilliant and dogged at his job. Death may be stalking The Castro, but people are living their lives despite that.
This series is highly recommended, a multiple reread for me. I picked up the first book revision immediately and dove into it, reminded of how much I like Henry. (Without looking back, I think that the new version is both smoother and more explicit than the original - unsurprisingly since on-page gay sex was far less acceptable in the 1980s.) If you haven't yet encountered Henry Rios, I recommend starting with book 1 - [b:Lay Your Sleeping Head|33790571|Lay Your Sleeping Head (The Henry Rios Novels)|Michael Nava|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1483510363l/33790571._SY75_.jpg|54681890], but this one could stand alone as a first time read.
the_novel_approach's review
5.0
Carved in Bone, the eighth installment in Michael Nava’s revered Henry Rios Mysteries series, is a story composed of loneliness and fear. There is, among other recurring elements, a thread of anxiety that undercuts the basic need for human connection which goes straight for the emotional jugular. And Nava’s aim is true.
The story opens in 1971, in a small town located on the outermost fringes of Chicago’s suburban sprawl, not with Henry but with eighteen-year-old Bill Ryan. Nava grooms readers to form an emotional connection to Bill, to foster an understanding of the exhilaration he feels to finally explore his sexuality in a true and meaningful way. And then in empathy as the spontaneous joy is replaced by horror and grief in the aftermath of what should have been a perfect moment. Nava succeeds in weaving the emotional connectivity between character and reader here, and these were the first of many more tears I would offer to this story before its end.
During his stay in the hospital, Bill is remade into someone new. He becomes one more in the plenitude of throwaway kids, offered a couple hundred dollars and dumped at the bus station by his mother to make his own way in the world, yet another soul added to the myriad souls which already populated the landscape of a San Francisco that was becoming a sanctuary for gay men. The structure and shape Bill takes, thereafter, is delineated first by his declaring out loud, for the first time, that he’s gay; followed by the people he meets, the friends he makes, the spaces he moves through, and the found family and the commonality he discovers within the community. He is galvanized by the acceptance he hadn’t expected to find, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t still an undercurrent of loneliness that, as the years passed, morphed into an emotionally paralyzing fear and self-loathing.
Bill’s and Henry’s stories converge in 1984, when Henry is hired by Western Insurance to investigate a life insurance claim. It’s far from his dream job, but after nearly drinking himself to death, Henry doesn’t have much choice but to pursue it. The investigation into Bill’s sudden death appears to be a clear-cut case of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. As Henry digs deeper, however, the clues and facts don’t add up, and, in fact, he uncovers a graver, unexpected layer of criminality. It’s through his investigation that the story alternates points of view. Rather than Henry showing readers, through the procedural of the investigation, how Bill spent the ten-plus years after his arrival in San Francisco, we are instead offered a more intimate view of the years during which Bill made the Castro his home with his best friend Waldo. Readers are made firsthand witnesses to Bill falling in and out of love, and then in love again for the final time, with Nick Trejo, a man ten years his junior. By then, Bill had made something out of the nothing he began with, but his past still nipped doggedly at his heels.
Found family and falling in love never quite fills the hole left gaping in Bill’s life caused by the misery of rejection and the belief that he was made wrong and isn’t deserving of the life he sees so clearly but cannot grasp. Bill continued to hope for the hopeless, but his efforts were an exercise in futility. As a result, he punished himself for who he was, which is reflected in the choices he made, and those ties to his past eventually became a noose. Bill’s should have been, could have been, the story of the throwaway kid who made good. But, as Nava states so candidly in his Author Notes:
This is where the book finds accord with its title. Bill’s self-loathing and abject fear became a living and breathing thing, carved into his core and crippling him mentally and emotionally. This went on to spawn the possessive, suffocating love Bill offered Nick, who embodied the antithesis of who Bill was. The impact of the AIDS epidemic and the near debilitating terror it inspired puts paid to any sort of peace Bill might have found, which Nava handles with unvarnished truth and unbridled compassion. The losses were devastating, the sense of helplessness was crushing as a dispassionate government watched, and it becomes clear, as Henry’s investigation continues, that anger and fear and loneliness are a few things he and Bill had in common, which was the catalyst for the desire to each numb their feelings in various ways.
As Henry pursues answers with the resolve readers of this series are familiar with, it is impossible not to draw parallels and note the clear juxtaposition between Henry’s investigative tenacity and his reluctance to pick apart his own past and poke at some of the more profound feelings he’s been holding on to for years. His AA sponsor, Larry Ross, becomes an invaluable cog in the machine of Henry’s sobriety and a voice of reason when Henry appears headed towards disaster with a man who, while never anything but honest with Henry, was also not good for him. Larry’s role is also emotionally underscored by a revelation that adds yet another gut-check to a story rife with emotional gut-checks, propelling Henry into making a life-changing decision.
That Henry Rios was introduced more than thirty years ago, and that his character still resonates with audiences today, is a testament to the timelessness and relevance of his stories as well as to the author’s storytelling acumen and the sympathy Nava builds between reader and character. The alchemy of emotions that can change a person for better or worse are commonalities of a human condition that bridges differences. The setting of the story is an homage to a San Francisco both past and present, to her unique landscape and the diversity of her people. The Painted Ladies, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Castro, and her vibrancy come alive and provide the backdrop for a mournful time in history. A painful time that echoes across the years and lives on in the memories of those who survived and in the journals and stories of those who didn’t.
Reviewed for The Novel Approach
The story opens in 1971, in a small town located on the outermost fringes of Chicago’s suburban sprawl, not with Henry but with eighteen-year-old Bill Ryan. Nava grooms readers to form an emotional connection to Bill, to foster an understanding of the exhilaration he feels to finally explore his sexuality in a true and meaningful way. And then in empathy as the spontaneous joy is replaced by horror and grief in the aftermath of what should have been a perfect moment. Nava succeeds in weaving the emotional connectivity between character and reader here, and these were the first of many more tears I would offer to this story before its end.
During his stay in the hospital, Bill is remade into someone new. He becomes one more in the plenitude of throwaway kids, offered a couple hundred dollars and dumped at the bus station by his mother to make his own way in the world, yet another soul added to the myriad souls which already populated the landscape of a San Francisco that was becoming a sanctuary for gay men. The structure and shape Bill takes, thereafter, is delineated first by his declaring out loud, for the first time, that he’s gay; followed by the people he meets, the friends he makes, the spaces he moves through, and the found family and the commonality he discovers within the community. He is galvanized by the acceptance he hadn’t expected to find, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t still an undercurrent of loneliness that, as the years passed, morphed into an emotionally paralyzing fear and self-loathing.
Bill’s and Henry’s stories converge in 1984, when Henry is hired by Western Insurance to investigate a life insurance claim. It’s far from his dream job, but after nearly drinking himself to death, Henry doesn’t have much choice but to pursue it. The investigation into Bill’s sudden death appears to be a clear-cut case of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning. As Henry digs deeper, however, the clues and facts don’t add up, and, in fact, he uncovers a graver, unexpected layer of criminality. It’s through his investigation that the story alternates points of view. Rather than Henry showing readers, through the procedural of the investigation, how Bill spent the ten-plus years after his arrival in San Francisco, we are instead offered a more intimate view of the years during which Bill made the Castro his home with his best friend Waldo. Readers are made firsthand witnesses to Bill falling in and out of love, and then in love again for the final time, with Nick Trejo, a man ten years his junior. By then, Bill had made something out of the nothing he began with, but his past still nipped doggedly at his heels.
Found family and falling in love never quite fills the hole left gaping in Bill’s life caused by the misery of rejection and the belief that he was made wrong and isn’t deserving of the life he sees so clearly but cannot grasp. Bill continued to hope for the hopeless, but his efforts were an exercise in futility. As a result, he punished himself for who he was, which is reflected in the choices he made, and those ties to his past eventually became a noose. Bill’s should have been, could have been, the story of the throwaway kid who made good. But, as Nava states so candidly in his Author Notes:
“It’s hard for any human being to be hated for something that he or she cannot change, and even those who are strong enough to resist the hatred as irrational cannot help but be damaged by it.”
This is where the book finds accord with its title. Bill’s self-loathing and abject fear became a living and breathing thing, carved into his core and crippling him mentally and emotionally. This went on to spawn the possessive, suffocating love Bill offered Nick, who embodied the antithesis of who Bill was. The impact of the AIDS epidemic and the near debilitating terror it inspired puts paid to any sort of peace Bill might have found, which Nava handles with unvarnished truth and unbridled compassion. The losses were devastating, the sense of helplessness was crushing as a dispassionate government watched, and it becomes clear, as Henry’s investigation continues, that anger and fear and loneliness are a few things he and Bill had in common, which was the catalyst for the desire to each numb their feelings in various ways.
As Henry pursues answers with the resolve readers of this series are familiar with, it is impossible not to draw parallels and note the clear juxtaposition between Henry’s investigative tenacity and his reluctance to pick apart his own past and poke at some of the more profound feelings he’s been holding on to for years. His AA sponsor, Larry Ross, becomes an invaluable cog in the machine of Henry’s sobriety and a voice of reason when Henry appears headed towards disaster with a man who, while never anything but honest with Henry, was also not good for him. Larry’s role is also emotionally underscored by a revelation that adds yet another gut-check to a story rife with emotional gut-checks, propelling Henry into making a life-changing decision.
That Henry Rios was introduced more than thirty years ago, and that his character still resonates with audiences today, is a testament to the timelessness and relevance of his stories as well as to the author’s storytelling acumen and the sympathy Nava builds between reader and character. The alchemy of emotions that can change a person for better or worse are commonalities of a human condition that bridges differences. The setting of the story is an homage to a San Francisco both past and present, to her unique landscape and the diversity of her people. The Painted Ladies, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Castro, and her vibrancy come alive and provide the backdrop for a mournful time in history. A painful time that echoes across the years and lives on in the memories of those who survived and in the journals and stories of those who didn’t.
Reviewed for The Novel Approach
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