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Provincetown, MA, drag entertainer Tuki Aparecio, 29, is charged with murder and arson. A court-appointed lawyer Michael Decastro thinks s/he is innocent, but since the police are convinced they have their criminal, he must conduct his own investigation. Very quickly the mystery becomes far less interesting than the psychosexual tension between the two leads. In his mid-twenties, Michael is just beginning his career. His wedding is just a month away, unfortunately close to the same time as the trial date. A descendent of Portuguese-American fishermen, he has always accepted the macho culture he was reared in. Therefore, Michael is perplexed when he becomes consumed by his client’s case, feeling more emotionally connected to it than to his upcoming marriage. He does not think he is gay, but he is honest enough to admit to his fiancée, when she asks: "Okay. There have been times during the last week or so when I’ve wondered about myself. Wondered why this case has sort of taken over my life. I don’t know the answer. At first, maybe my attraction to the case was the puzzle. A very strange puzzle. Tuki’s world was so foreign to me that I found myself fascinated by everything about it. I felt like an explorer." As he probes, we get bits of her story, a little at a time. Tuki was the illegitimate child of an African American soldier and a Vietnamese entertainer in Saigon. With its fall in 1975, she was taken to Bangkok by two male-to-female transsexuals, friends of her mother’s, and reared by them as a girl. In fact, it comes out (and I am not spoiling the story since the discovery has none of the impact of Dil’s revelation in The Crying Game) that she is intersexed, what used to be called a hermaphrodite. In Bangkok she fell in love with a well-to-do Thai, whose culture would not allow him to live openly as a gay man. After an ill-conceived plan of revenge against him for abandoning her, Tuki fled to the United States. There she became caught up in a ring of international prostitutes and drag performers who were all blackmailed with threats of exposing their illegal status to immigration. It was their john whom Tuki supposedly stabbed and whose office she then allegedly set afire. All this time, Tuki has been searching for her father, the man who first abandoned her. The story is complex, but easy to follow. From the beginning, the reader feels compelled to become actively involved in putting the pieces of Tuki’s life together. In doing so, one is subtly invited to contemplate the nature of gender identity, the mysteries of sexual attraction, the father-child relationship, the meaning of the American experience in Vietnam, and the attraction of the exotic. At the same time, one gains some insight into the world of drag queens, but the novel is no rerun of Paris is Burning and far from being another To Wong Foo. This is Randall Peffer’s second mystery, following 2004's KILLING NEPTUNE’S DAUGHTER (which RTE earlier reviewed). It is written in short chapters averaging three to five pages each. The novel uses the historical present tense so naturally that I was several chapters into the book before I even noticed the fact. Though told in the third person, the mystery is mostly seen through Michael’s eyes. Tuki’s memories of the past are set apart in italics and are related as Michael learns about the incidents. The fact that films keep popping into my mind when I seek comparisons attests to the strong visual and aural qualities of the novel. Night scenes especially are vividly rendered, and music plays constantly in the background, one pop tune after another being mentioned. Though technically a murder mystery, the revelation of the killer is ultimately of less importance than the resolution of the tensions between Michael and Tuki. The novel is better read for its cultural, psychological, and even sexual insights than for solving who did it. That said, it remains one of the better mysteries I have read this year.
Reviewed by Drewey Wayne Gunn, November 2006
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