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SUMMER CRUISING
by Dave Benbow
Palari Publishing, June 2006
320 pages
$14.95
ISBN: 1928662072


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Someone who calls himself Dante is first seducing, then killing passengers on a gay cruise ship sailing the European coast of the western Mediterranean. At the same time, Rex Lassiter, the homophobic owner aboard the ship, threatens to abort the cruise because of anonymous notes he receives threatening to blow up the vessel. None of these dangers, however, slows down the partying or the sex or the roving if frustrated eye of Mrs Lassiter.

This is a grab bag of a novel with some parts more successful than others. I tended to skim the travel information. If I want cultural info about Barcelona or Rome, I prefer to read a guidebook. But the minute-by-minute description of the shipwreck became a real page-turner for me. There is also lots of romance, lots of sex. The mystery itself is constructed with just enough plausible red herrings to make the whole work an entirely pleasant summer read.

Given that the murderer is a psychopathic closet case and that the rest of the passengers are pretty sexually liberated, his identity quickly narrows to one of two people. But the author manages to keep the reader guessing which is the one right up until the moment he chooses to expose the villain. The only cloud in the fictional sky is that two of the three victims are so appealing as humans a reader may be dismayed when they meet their ends.

The great strength of the novel lies in its depiction of different sets of relationships at various stages of development. Budding photographer Zack Barnes is dumped literally at the Los Angeles airport by his self-centered lover and sent on the cruise alone.

Though concerned that he is moving too fast, Zack falls hard for Hayden Beasley, a businessman stationed in Barcelona (and the brother of the protagonist of Dave Benbow's first novel, DAYTIME DRAMA, 2003). For his part, Hayden is smitten enough that he wangles time off to accompany Zack on the cruise. And then Zack's boyfriend from hell shows up to beg to be taken back.

Hayden's Los Angeles friends, publisher Kurt Farrar and newscaster Rick Yung, reach a critical turn in their life together. Kurt discovers that Rick has been offered a promotion to New York. They must decide if Rick will accept, if Kurt will then take his business to New York, or if they will terminate their relationship. Meanwhile, tour head Jeff Miller finds himself irresistibly drawn to one of the passengers, Dan Smith, who keeps slipping away. The author lets us see just enough of the mysterious Dan's activities to make us alternately suspect he is the murderer, and then he is some sort of spy.

The answer comes two-thirds of the way through the novel when the bombs the villain has cunningly concealed on the ship are prematurely exploded. The rest of the novel is constructed as an elaborate cliff hanger for the author to weave among his cast of some 20 characters to show each one's struggle, including the perpetrator's, to pull through.

The final easy intermingling of the bedraggled survivors, scantily clad in party finery, with straight senior citizens aboard the cruise ship that picks them up affirms the author's belief that humans could be kind to one another regardless of sexual preferences if they would only permit themselves to behave naturally.

Other than the over-abundance of information about Gaudi, Michelangelo, and the like (which, in flipping back through the novel, I find actually takes up less space than it seemed while reading), my only complaint is the proof-reading. The publisher has allowed far too many errors to slip through: spelling errors like you're for your, grammatical errors like grinded for ground, the assignment of the wrong name to characters, words out of order, and other puzzling slips occur throughout.

Reviewed by Drewey Wayne Gunn, June 2006

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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