Bright light

Light Before Day * Christopher Rice * Miramax * $23.95

Christopher Rice's superb third novel hits all its marks as a sexy mystery-thriller. It's a first-tier page-turner--but it's also much more. Rice's powerful, prescient, and ultimately moving layering of social commentary on 21st-century West Hollywood gay life moves Light Before Day out of the realm of genre and into the forefront of contemporary gay writing.

Rice's protagonist, Adam Murphy, is a 26-year-old "serious" journalist trapped at a fluffy gay magazine where hard news is always trumped by the search for a subject who looks "like an Abercrombie & Fitch model," where human interest stories are killed based on the physical appearance of the subject. When Adam stumbles across a story about a closeted marine helicopter pilot whose death raises unanswerable questions, he is inexplicably fired from his job. Subsequently hired as an investigative assistant to James Wilton, a famous crime writer, Adam comes to realize that the marine story has wide-ranging implications and points to a serial killer targeting gay men.

When his ex-lover vanishes without a trace, Adam finds himself embroiled in a world of murder, child pornography, and crystal meth. Rice, who writes a column for this magazine, skillfully sketches a sordid world of fourth-tier porn "stars" and the devastation--both human and cultural--wreaked by emotional and sexual exploitation of youth and beauty. Most impressive, he doesn't glamorize, demonize, or caricature iris subjects. Instead, he empathizes, as when an older character observes of Adam's hard-partying 20-something generation, "You die too quickly to get anyone's attention."

COPYRIGHT 2005 Liberation Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group