Los Angeles, 1986. A group of right-wing Christians has put an initiative on the November ballot to allow health officials to force people with HIV into quarantine camps. It looks like it's going to pass. Rios, now living in LA, agrees to be counsel for a group of young activists who call themselves QUEER [Queers United to End Erasure and Repression]. QUEER claims to be committed to peaceful civil disobedience. But when one of its members is implicated in the bombing of an evangelical church that kills its pastor, who publicly supported the quarantine initiative, Rios finds himself with a client suddenly facing the death penalty

A new mystery by six time Lambda Literary award-winning author, Michael Nava. It's classic noir with a queer twist. Set in San Francisco in 1984, Henry Rios is hired by an insurance company to investigate the apparently accidental death by carbon monoxide poisoning of Bill Ryan in his Castro Street apartment, but Rios becomes convinced Ryan's death was no accident, and that his young lover is implicated.David Ebershoff, author of The Danish Girl, calls Carved In Bone  a "rich, haunting," novel that features "one of the most original protagonists in American crime fiction."

In the years before the Mexican Revolution, Mexico is ruled by a tiny elite that apes European culture, grows rich from foreign investment, and prizes racial purity. The vast majority of Mexicans, who are native or of mixed native and Spanish blood, are politically powerless and slowly starving to death. Presiding over this corrupt system is Don Porfirio Díaz, the ruthless and inscrutable president of the Republic.            Against this backdrop, The City of Palaces opens in a Mexico City jail with the meeting of Miguel Sarmiento and Alicia Gavilán. Miguel is a principled young doctor, only recently returned from Europe but wracked by guilt for a crime he committed as a medical student ten years earlier. Alicia is the spinster daughter of an aristocratic family. Disfigured by smallpox, she has devoted herself to working with the city's destitute. This unlikely pair—he a scientist and atheist and she a committed Christian—will marry. Through their eyes...

Attorney Henry Rios fights for his freedom and his own life when a homophobic serial killer targets gay men in Los AngelesDefense attorney Henry Rios knows how the system can be weighted against you . . . especially if you’re gay. His worst nightmare becomes a reality when a man he had been on a date with the night before is slain. Relentlessly pursued by a homophobic Los Angeles Police Department cop, Rios goes from prime suspect to target when more gay men are savagely murdered. The victims all suffer the same fate: They’re beaten to death, with a hate message carved into their bodies, and they’re dumped in an alley.Rios must break through a conspiracy of silence that reaches to the highest levels of Los Angeles politics and Hollywood power. And the closer he gets to the truth, the closer he gets to becoming an enraged killer’s next victim.  The Burning Plain is the sixth book in the Henry Rios mystery series, which begins with The Little Death and Goldenboy*.

In the first book of the acclaimed Henry Rios series, a lawyer doggedly pursues a murder investigation into the lions’ den of San Francisco’s moneyed eliteA burnt-out public defender battling alcoholism, Henry Rios has reached a crossroads in his life. While interviewing his former lover Hugh Paris in jail, Rios goes through the motions, but notices that Paris is far more polished and well off than the usual suspects arrested for drug possession. Paris is mysteriously bailed out—but a few weeks later, he turns up on Rios’s doorstep. Skittish and paranoid, he admits to using heroin and says he’s afraid that his wealthy grandfather wants to murder him.Rios tries to help Paris get clean, but when Paris is found dead of an apparent heroin overdose, Rios is the only one who considers foul play. Determined to find Paris’s killer, Rios knocks on San Francisco’s most gilded doors, where he discovers a family tainted by jealousy, greed, and hate. They’ve been warped by a fortune someone’s willing to kill—and kill again—to possess.At once an atmospheric noir mystery and a scathing indictment of a legal system caught in the maws of escalating corruption, The Little Death chronicles one man’s struggle to achieve true justice for all.The Little Death is the first book in the Henry Rios mystery series, which also includes Goldenboy and Howtown.Review“This murder mystery about a gay public defender in the San Francisco area is distinguished by good writing and by skillful adaptation of the genre’s traditions . . . Particularly striking is Nava’s vision of the legal system as a true instrument of justice.” — Publishers Weekly About the AuthorMichael Nava (b. 1954) is the award-winning author of seven novels featuring criminal defense lawyer Henry Rios. Nava wrote The Little Death (1986), the first book in the series, while he was in law school. That debut was followed by Goldenboy (1988), How Town (1990), The Hidden Law (1992), The Death of Friends (1996), The Burning Plain (1997), and Rag and Bone (2001). He is also the co-author of the nonfiction book Created Equal: Why Gay Rights Matter to America (1994). Nava is a six-time recipient of the Lambda Literary Award in the mystery category, as well as the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award for gay and lesbian literature. Nava lives in San Francisco, where he works as an appellate lawyer.

From Publishers WeeklyGay attorney Henry Rios, hero of Nava's previous The Little Death, appears here for the first time in hardcover, venturing from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to solve a series of grisly murders in a fast-paced novel that is as troubling as it is entertaining. When a gay teenager is arrested for the murder of a co-worker, who threatened to expose his homosexuality, Rios is called to L.A. by Larry Ross, a close friend and fellow lawyer who is dying of AIDS; too ill to rise to the boy's defense himself, Ross asks Rios to "balance the accounts" by preserving the accused murderer's life in exchange for Ross's own. Both, he explains, are afflicted by the same diseasethe bigotry that "shows itself in letting people die of AIDS, making it so difficult for them to come out that it's easier to murder." Nava's palpable anger at that prejudiceand its tragic consequencescomes through with an urgency that transcends the central detective story. Despite a shamelessly sentimental ending, it is the many rough edges of Goldenboy that linger in the reader's mind long after the breathless conclusion. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalAsked to defend a young homosexual accused of murder, well-known criminal lawyer Henry Rios ( The Little Death ) hesitates. With the trial date a mere two days away, and with overwhelming evidence against the man, Rios needs time to prepare. As series protagonist and narrator, Henry not only voices the theme of heterosexual bigotry against gays, but also denigrates the exploitation of gays by other homosexuals. Unfortunately, Nava subordinates these themes and solution of the mystery itself to a rather precipitous love affair between Rios and a prosecution witness. A notch or two above Joseph Hansen in quality, this is, overall, well-written and interesting. REKCopyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

When a judge leading a double life is murdered, Henry Rios comes to the controversial defense of the prime suspectChris Chandler, a long-married and closeted California state superior court judge, has been found dead in his chambers—beaten to death with his recent Judge of the Year award. When his young lover, Zack Bowen, is arrested, Henry Rios takes on Bowen’s defense. For Rios, who has kept Judge Chandler’s secret since law school, it means going up against a closed community—including Chandler’s angry wife and son—to defend a man he believes innocent. Then Bowen vanishes.As Rios copes with the loss of a friend, and the impending death of his lover, Josh, he finds himself front and center in a case that becomes a test of his own moral courage.The Death of Friends is the fifth book in the Henry Rios mystery series, which begins with The Little Death and Goldenboy*.