Rust on the Razor

Following weeks of tabloid rumors, Chicago baseball player Scott Carpenter publicly discloses that he's gay. Instantly the subject of sermons, Scott is besieged by the media, dropped from his endorsements, and sidelined by an injury; life couldn't get worse for him and his lover, high school teacher Tom Mason.
Until, of course, it does. In the midst of the uproar, Scott's father has a heart attack, and Tom and Scott rush to rural Georgia to be by his side. There they must deal not only with Scott's father's illness but with a plague of bigorty and homophobia from the local officials, the town's people and Scott's own siblings as well. Worse still, the town's sheriff is found murdered in the backseat of their car, and local officials would like nothing better than to pin the murder on Tom. Now Tom must uncover the hostile town's secrets and find the real murderer if he ever hopes to leave this small Georgia town alive.

Pallid both as a thriller and a romance (or a spoof), this Regency mystery features four foppish aristocrats in search of a killer. Corinne, Dowager Countess deCoventry, "still" ravishing at 24, has her fabulously entailed family pearls plucked from her throat by a rogue dressed as Robin Hood at a masquerade ball. She noticed that his hands were rough and he spoke with a French accent. Armed with this information, her three good friends?Lord Luten (the leader of the Ton, or fashionable London), Sir Reginald Prance (a witless dandy) and Coffen Pattle (agreeable and rich)?band together to track down the invaluable gems. Collectively known as the Berkeley Brigade (they all live on Berkeley Square), they ferret out a Drury Lane seamstress who provided the Robin Hood costume. She is obviously frightened and is later discovered strangled. Utilizing their best skills (mostly arrogant sneers, haughty smiles and bored drawls), the foursome discover the Robin Hood impostor, now also dead. A whirlwind farce follows, with interviews in glittering ballrooms populated with bejeweled women and rakish men. Enfeebled prose ("She had hair like spun silk... her lips were ripe and red as cherries") does little to enrich this hapless story by the author of over 100 Regency romances... and a few mysteries (Behold, A Mystery!, 1994).
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Strike three for Chicago pitcher Scott Carpenter: First, he's pressed to come completely out of the closet; then a pulled groin muscle takes him off the mound; finally, his father's heart attack recalls him to Brinard, Georgia, where men are men and Scott's lover, high-school teacher Tom Mason, is about as welcome as the return of General Sherman. If even Scott's brothers, big Hiram and little Nathan, resent Scott's success and hate the man they think turned him away from the straight and narrow, imagine what the locals think when redneck Sheriff Pete Woodall gets his throat slit the night after Tom publicly stands up to his harassment. Taken into custody but released, Tom figures he'd better solve the murder himself if he wants it solved right, and he joins forces with Scott's high-school girlfriend Violet Burnside, a former cheerleader with a steely spine, and reporter Dennis Hale, who's going to be very sorry he ever signed on. Together they find out that the sheriff was blackmailing half the town for the usual sexual irregularities (homosexuality, miscegenation, pederasty). But there'll be more trouble for Tom and his friends even before a climactic flood washes away Brinard's hypocrisy, along with a good deal of the town's real estate. Zubro presents his antigay intrigue with a vividness and a sober concentration that make you wonder why he ever wasted his time on the silly antics of Tom and Scott's last outing (An Echo of Death, 1994). -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In Zubro's latest Tom and Scott mystery, right off the bat, professional baseball player Scott Carpenter comes out. The tabloids have a field day, and Scott loses a lucrative celebrity endorsement deal. Shortly after, his father has a heart attack, and with Tom, his high-school-teacher lover, he flies to Georgia and his family, who, except for one sister, have been unreceptive to the news about him. Tom and Scott haven't been in town for 24 hours before Tom has a run-in with a homophobic sheriff and encounters the local KKK leader. Next day, Tom finds the sheriff dead and himself the suspected murderer. Tom investigates and, after misadventures, solves the crime. What with Scott's stilted dialogue and Tom's bumbling through the Georgia swamps, this is a letdown from its predecessors. Loyal fans, however, will demand the book, and afterwards wish, perhaps, that Zubro would concentrate on his Paul Turner mysteries, with their warmer, more appealing characters. Charles Harmon