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DEAD EGOTISTICAL MORONS
by Mark Richard Zubro
St. Martin's Minotaur, August 2003
280 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 0312266820


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

This book was, I'm sorry to say, a disappointment; but I still recommend it because I think readers will appreciate it. I've read several mysteries in both series by Mark Richard Zubro. What I like is that he presents his gay sleuths (here, gay cop Paul Turner) totally matter-of-factly and Turner's straight partner, Buck Fenwick portrays, for me, what normal should be when you have a gay partner. I don't know Chicago well, but it feels real to me in the books. This mystery left me feeling a bit let-down however.

For one thing, the story is about how a massively successful boy band, Boys4U, is an unhappy miserable place to be and how nothing is what it appears. I'm not fooled into believing that boy bands are happy happy places, but Zubro seems intent on showing that every single person involved is self-absorbed, manipulative, jealous, and/or evil. It's unrelentingly depressing to me. And I had problems with the dialogue which seemed flat to me; sometimes, it was repetitious, sometimes just bordering on Dragnet deadpan. This was especially noticeable when things picked up. When Zubro writes good engaging dialogue, it contrasts markedly to the rest of the time. The band members are, I realized on reflection, very accustomed to giving interviews but their full sentence responses to the deaths and later seemed unrealistic. I know it's possibly unfair of me to criticize, since you can't always mimic real conversation, but it simply did not work for me.

Boys4U is on the last week of a six-month tour. On their last night in Chicago, one of the five is found murdered in the shower room of the huge performance center. Few people seem to really care, and there are few clues, since there was a loud celebration going on with lots of people, so no one saw or heard anything. The band's organizer is a sleaze, the publicist wears hats with veils, there's a scummy third rate journalist who has decided he's the world's best "amateur sleuth" and will solve this murder. No one wants to cooperate with Paul and Buck; they'd rather trade accusations, stonewall or mouth publicity platitudes.

Clearly the band members are affected, one especially, who somehow finds Paul's house and ends up having a breakdown while there. There's a fair amount of hysterics in the story, lots of acting-out, lots of preening. It was distasteful to spend time around these people. There was one character who was seriously damaged - a band member - and it was made clear that not only did no one notice, no one cared that he was messed up. How he functioned is a puzzle to me, seeing how close he was to the edge, mentally. 

I also knew who did it about halfway through although I did not know why. There were some loose ends I thought that were brought out about a set of parents that were never clarified. And I wasn't convinced by the wrap-up at the end that the crimes (there's more than one murder) made any sort of sense.

So why read it? Because it probably is close to the truth about the world of pop music. Because when Turner and his partner are on, they're smart. Fenwick in particular is an interesting character; at times he goes ballistic, but it's very planned and he knows what he's doing while his partner tends to watch in some awe and amusement. And because Zubro writes people well. I read the book in one sitting. I just couldn't wait to get out of this book as fast as possible; too much phony, too much manipulation and posturing. It seemed clear that Zubro seriously dislikes this part of the entertainment world; I don't mind "agendas" and I'm guessing that he portrays a relatively realistic, if exaggerated part of music. I sort of guessed it from the title, but when I was finished, I was glad to be out of that world.

Reviewed by Andi Shechter, July 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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