Michael Nava

Don Strachey isn't exactly the most sought-after private eye in Albany, New York. In fact, this gay P.I. has gotten to the point of having to write checks to pay his tab at the cheapest lunch counter in town. And he isn't sure that the latest one, for the grand total of two dollars and ninety-three cents, is going to clear. Surprisingly he's hired to locate Billy Blount, the gay heir to one of Saratoga Springs' upper-crust families. On top of that, Billy, a young and outspoken gay activist, is wanted for the grisly murder of the man he slept with on his last night in Albany - a man he'd never met before that night.Written just before the onslaught of AIDS, Death Trick is a time capsule of gay life as it existed in smaller towns in America. A foreword for this new edition by Michael Nava (Henry Rios series) is included."This murder mystery, recounted with sassiness and wit, is full of true-to-life details about contemporary gay existence. Stevenson uses the yarn to poke fun at straitlaced parents, homophobic cops and greedy gay bar owners ... This is a great lazy-day read - and politically correct, yet " - The Advocate"Stevenson holds his own with the top novelists of the clever mystery genre. He writes wittily and knowingly about his subjects, both the gay world and the world of politics, and draws telling portraits of the bitter, clever amusing men who inhabit both." - West Coast Review of Books"Sassy and sexy ... Don Strachey is a private dick who really earns his title." - Armistead Maupin"Mystery fans had better grab hold of this and keep an eye out for Richard Stevenson." - Bay Area Reporter

A Donald Strachey Mystery, Book 1 - Don Strachey isn't exactly the most sought-after private eye in Albany, New York. In fact, this gay P.I. has gotten to the point of having to write checks to pay his tab at the cheapest lunch counter in town. And he isn't sure that the latest one, for the grand total of two dollars and ninety-three cents, is going to clear.Surprisingly he's hired to locate Billy Blount, the gay heir to one of Saratoga Springs' upper-crust families. On top of that, Billy, a young and outspoken gay activist, is wanted for the grizzly murder of the man he slept with on his last night in Albany - a man he'd never met before that night.Written just before the onslaught of AIDS, Death Trick is a time capsule of gay life as it existed in smaller towns in America. A foreword for the 2022 edition by Michael Nava (Henry Rios series) is included."This murder mystery, recounted with sassiness and wit, is full of true-to-life details about contemporary gay existence. Stevenson uses the yarn to poke fun at straitlaced parents, homophobic cops and greedy gay bar owners ... This is a great lazy-day read - and politically correct, yet " - The Advocate"Stevenson holds his own with the top novelists of the clever mystery genre. He writes wittily and knowingly about his subjects, both the gay world and the world of politics, and draws telling portraits of the bitter, clever amusing men who inhabit both." - West Coast Review of Books"Sassy and sexy ... Don Strachey is a private dick who really earns his title." - Armistead Maupin"Mystery fans had better grab hold of this and keep an eye out for Richard Stevenson." - Bay Area Reporter

Los Angeles, 1986.A group of right-wing Christians has put an initiative on the November ballot to allow health officials to force people with HIV into quarantine camps--and it looks like it's going to pass. Rios, now living in LA, agrees to be counsel for a group of young activists who call themselves QUEER Queers United to End Erasure and Repression]. QUEER claims to be committed to peaceful civil disobedience. But when one of its members is implicated in the bombing of an evangelical church that kills its pastor, who publicly supported the quarantine initiative, Rios finds himself with a client suddenly facing the death penalty.

In the years before the Mexican Revolution, Mexico is ruled by a tiny elite that apes European culture, grows rich from foreign investment, and prizes racial purity. The vast majority of Mexicans, who are native or of mixed native and Spanish blood, are politically powerless and slowly starving to death. Presiding over this corrupt system is Don Porfirio Diaz, the ruthless and inscrutable president of the Republic. Against this backdrop, The City of Palaces opens in a Mexico City jail with the meeting of Miguel Sarmiento and Alicia Gavilan. Miguel is a principled young doctor, only recently returned from Europe but wracked by guilt for a crime he committed as a medical student ten years earlier. Alicia is the spinster daughter of an aristocratic family. Disfigured by smallpox, she has devoted herself to working with the city's destitute. This unlikely pair--he a scientist and atheist and she a committed Christian--will marry. Through their eyes and the eyes of their young son, Jos , readers follow the collapse of the old order and its bloody aftermath. The City of Palaces is a sweeping novel of interwoven lives: Miguel and Alicia; Jos , a boy as beautiful and lonely as a child in a fairy tale; the idealistic Francisco Madero, who overthrows Diaz but is nevertheless destroyed by the tyrant's political system; and Miguel's cousin Luis, shunned as a "sodomite." A glittering mosaic of the colonial past and the wealth of the modern age, The City of Palaces is a story of faith and reason, cathedrals and hovels, barefoot street vendors and frock-coated businessmen, grand opera and silent film, presidents and peasants, the living and the dead.

Rios, raw from the death of his lover from AIDS, becomes involved with a young man who is murdered after spending the night with Rios. Rios becomes a suspect in the murder. In the process of clearing himself, he is drawn into the search for a serial killer who preys on young gay men in West Hollywood. He finds himself up against a homophobic cop, a hostile DA and a conspiracy that reaches into Hollywood's power elite.

After Rios suffers a heart attack, he sinks into a depression but he's soon shaken out of it, first by the prospect of new love and then by the appearance a niece he didn't know he had and her 10-year-old son. When his niece is accused of shooting her abusive husband, Rios takes a case that is more personal and more emotionally demanding than any other case he has ever faced.

November, 1984. Criminal defense lawyer Henry Rios, fresh out of rehab and picking up the pieces of his life, reluctantly accepts work as an insurance claims investigator and is immediately is assigned to investigate the apparently accidental death of Bill Ryan. Ryan, part of the great gay migration into San Francisco in the 1970s, has died in his flat of carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty gas line, his young lover barely surviving. Rios's investigation into Ryan's death - which Rios becomes convinced was no accident - tracks Ryan's life from his arrival in San Francisco as a terrified 18-year-old to his transformation into a successful businessman. What begins for Rios as the search for the truth about Bill Ryan's death becomes the search for the meaning of Ryan's life as the tsunami of AIDS bears down on the gay community.

Set in the summer of 1981, in a university town 30 miles south of San Francisco. Henry Rios, a gifted and humane lawyer driven to drink to by personal and professional demons, meets Hugh Paris, a charming junkie struggling to stay clean. Hugh tells Rios an improbable tale of long-ago murders in his wealthy family. Rios disbelieves him but the erotic spark between the two men ignites an obsessive affair that ends only when Hugh is discovered with a needle in his arm on the campus of the great university founded by his ancestor. Rios refused to believe Hugh's death was an accident. He begins an investigation that ultimately reveals much more than the identity of the men who murdered his lover.

Rios defends Michael Ruiz, a young man accused of murdering Gus Pe a, a powerful Los Angeles politician who had had his eye on the Mayor's office. Meanwhile, Rios must confront the collapse of his relationship with Josh Mandel, his HIV-positive lover.

Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for gay mystery, Howtown finds Rios back in his hometown of Los Robles, California defending Paul Windsor, a boyhood acquaintance accusing of murdering a pedophile. Windsor is himself a pedophile and the police believe the murder was the result of an extortion scheme gone wrong. It's up to Rios to prove otherwise, if he can. To do that, he has to confront the ghosts of his past that still linger in the sleepy river town. Simultaneously, the novel explores Rios's relationship with his HIV-positive lover, Josh Mandel.

On the morning after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, Zack Bowen turns up at Rios's doorstep with the news that Rios's old friend, Judge Chris Chandler, has been murdered in his downtown L.A. courtroom. Zack says he was Chandler's lover. The problem: Chandler was deep in the closet. Now, in order to defend Zack, Rios must decide how much of Chandler's secrets-and his own-he will have to reveal. While all this is happening, Rios's ex-lover Josh Mandel is dying from AIDS and calls on Rios to help him through his final days.

In the years before the Mexican Revolution, Mexico is ruled by a tiny elite that apes European culture, grows rich from foreign investment, and prizes racial purity. The vast majority of Mexicans, who are native or of mixed native and Spanish blood, are politically powerless and slowly starving to death. Presiding over this corrupt system is Don Porfirio Díaz, the ruthless and inscrutable president of the Republic.Against this backdrop, The City of Palaces opens in a Mexico City jail with the meeting of Miguel Sarmiento and Alicia Gavilán. Miguel is a principled young doctor, only recently returned from Europe but wracked by guilt for a crime he committed as a medical student ten years earlier. Alicia is the spinster daughter of an aristocratic family. Disfigured by smallpox, she has devoted herself to working with the city’s destitute. This unlikely pair—he a scientist and atheist and she a committed Christian—will marry. Through their eyes and the eyes of their young son, José, readers follow the collapse of the old order and its bloody aftermath.The City of Palaces is a sweeping novel of interwoven lives: Miguel and Alicia; José, a boy as beautiful and lonely as a child in a fairy tale; the idealistic Francisco Madero, who overthrows Díaz but is nevertheless destroyed by the tyrant’s political system; and Miguel’s cousin Luis, shunned as a “sodomite.” A glittering mosaic of the colonial past and the wealth of the modern age, The City of Palaces is a story of faith and reason, cathedrals and hovels, barefoot street vendors and frock-coated businessmen, grand opera and silent film, presidents and peasants, the living and the dead.