Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”-deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. This series, now up to three, just keeps getting better, and readers will surely anticipate the protagonist’s next outing.įour men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions-as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer-and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. The story has several worthy twists, though a couple of those are rather bleak. When someone asks her about Bill, Lee responds, “He’s dead,” or a terser “Dead.” However, she’s formidable in countless ways, from catching men watching or shadowing her to fighting off an assailant via impressive self-defense tactics (and that’s even before she can reach her Glock 26). Lee, whose former job entailed tracing criminal money, is meticulous and plainspoken, both of which are often reflected in her dialogue.

Her romantic entanglement with Secret Service agent Jim Sanders, for example, is inhibited by his apparently jealous partner, Jennifer Evans. Larew maintains a relatively simple mystery, which effectively juggles Lee’s multiple predicaments. The questions only build when there’s another disappearance, followed shortly thereafter by a murder. Lee pokes around bank accounts and makes inquiries, but her investigation turns personal when she uncovers a decades-old connection between the Chau Fong and both Sidney and her late father, Bill. Cops arrested him during the demonstrations (along with others, including Lee), but now Percy, like his dad, is missing. Henry’s son, Percy, is equally perplexing. But Lee can’t immediately link the antiques dealer to anything illicit that would involve the triads. She learns the men took Henry to a bar owned by the criminal triad group Chau Fong. She tails them but gets caught in a frenzied mob of democracy demonstrators. Unfortunately, almost as soon as Lee makes it to Wong Antiques, she spots two strangers leading Henry away. Though Lee no longer works for Sidney Worthington, she agrees to see if anything is amiss with his friend and Hong Kong contact Henry Wong, who hasn’t made contact in nearly two months. In Larew’s ( Aftermath, 2017, etc.) thriller, Lee Carruthers’ latest case takes her to Hong Kong to check on her ex–CIA boss’s contact.

Dead in Dubai by Marilynn Larew