More Gorillas! More mystery!

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Product Description

2024 was a rough year for Drew Parker. His car broke down, his rent went up, and his partner was kidnapped by a revenge-crazed performance artist with a grant from the NEA. Worse, one of his clients had been tossed off a sky scraper—after being stripped naked, smeared in human fat, and painted with occult symbols. Drew himself had broken into the headquarters of the Christian Militia on a wild goose chase, and nearly gotten his brain fried trying to get back out. And then there was the assassination attempt on that cross dressing Cherokee Shaman, which Drew might not have stopped if he'd known how much trouble it was going to get him into. And that's not even counting the talking gorilla in the fedora.

So far, 2025 isn't shaping up to be much better.

What had started as a simple case involving identical quintuplet actors cloned from the frozen corpse of a dead movie star was suddenly getting complicated. The pushy stage mom was to be expected, but the secret agents from the Cherokee nation came as a bit of a surprise, as did the lethal martial artist in the clown mask who had broken into his office. Nor had Drew planned on finding himself in the middle of a political death match between competing tele-ministeries. Besides, Drew had a personal score to settle, a little matter involving a privatized version of the KGB, a ring of male prostitutes, and a vampire sex cult.

Oh well, at least his Wiccan partner, Jen, is back to help him out. If he can just get her to cut back on the practical jokes and the dating advice.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #907381 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 416 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Set in 2025 Atlanta, this sequel to Hartman's first novel, The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse (2001), features gay detective Drew Parke, his Wiccan partner Jennifer Grey and a large supporting cast of strange people. Like its predecessor, it employs the same irresistible zaniness and wit, multiple viewpoints, high sexual content (both gay and straight) and cheerfully chaotic narrative technique. Jennifer is hired by a young deaf-mute named Skye, who wants to find out whether her boyfriend, Charles Rockland (an actor, and one of five cloned hunks), is cheating on her. Meanwhile, Drew's sidekick and sometime lover, Daniel, is in trouble with the law. In both cases, it turns out that there's extremely nasty blackmail behind the troublemaking what might be called a family feud in real life. Add to this a band of Cherokees trying to get back Georgia, while lurking in the background are dueling televangelists, each with his crop of the ambitious or the thuggish (you expected the devout?), and it's obvious that the author has produced another engagingly weird novel of the near future, satirizing everything he can get his word processor on and doing most of it extremely well. In the absence of conventional narrative, readers can instead enjoy jumping from good part to good part. (Nov.)nominated for a Lambda Award in both the mystery and SF/fantasy categories.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author
Keith grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, which in addition to being "Rocket City USA" also has the distinction of being one of the few cities in America ever captured by a Russian general. (Or so the story goes. Alot of really odd things happened during the Civil War.) He graduated from Princeton University, then went on to study at the London School of Economics, then started a PhD in Finance at Duke University. Sometime around his third year of the finance program, he realized that he really didn't want to spend the rest of his life teaching MBA's how to screw each other, and ran away to become a writer.

His first book was Congregations in Conflict, an examination of nine different churches and how they dealt with the issue of homosexuality, sometimes in surprising ways--like the Southern Baptist Church which voted to marry two gay men, the order of seventy year old celibate monks who all came out of the closet together , and the Black Catholic church which expelled its gay organization in order to be more "inclusive". The book was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, and Keith appeared as a guest on NPR's Talk of the Nation in conjunction with it.

His second book, The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse is one of those novels that really confuses book store owners, because they can never figure out which section of the shop to put it in. The critics have alternately described it as science fiction, mystery, social commentary, magic realism, and even a coming of age story. It won two Spectrum Awards for science fiction, was picked as one of the "Eight Best Mysteries of 1999" by The Drood Review of Mysteries, and was a double nominee for the Lambda Literary Awards in the "Men's Mystery"and "Science Fiction / Fantasy" categories.

Over the years, he's also choreographed dance pieces, written and acted in radio dramas, worked as a theater critic, and even spent a couple of years performing with the Princeton Mime Company. Keith currently lives in West Hollywood with his boyfriend Scott and his cat Urvashi, named after a Hindu Goddess whose principal duties consist of lounging around and letting the world admire her beauty. His hobbies include juggling, RPG's, and falling down in interesting ways.

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Customer Reviews

Paging an editor...any editor
Keith Hartman's next novel should feature a really bad copy editor who is horribly killed because he simply couldn't recognize an error, even to save his skin. It would be partial revenge for the work - or lack of work - done on Gumshoe Gorilla. Almost every page contains an error, and almost every error in the grammar book is made more than once. Capitalization, font, spelling, and every element of punctuation known to the English language (especially apostrophes) - each and every one gets horribly mangled in this novel. So, if you can read English reasonably well, don't expect to be able to read this book without cringing and moaning in pain.

Despite that, though, it's a fairly good book - it'd be worth four stars without the editing problem. The characters are still fun, the writing is still funny (even if it would make Strunk and White foam at the mouth), and Hartman still has a deft hand with social satire. Unfortunately, the plot isn't quite as intelligent as The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse's was - it's too easy to put the pieces together. Readers who are looking for a puzzle to solve will be finished well before the book is over.

But readers looking for a light, enjoyable book with lots of humor will really like Gumshoe Gorilla. They'd just better bring their red pens with them.

A good read
The year is 2025. Scientists have discovered the gene for homosexuality, the Cherokee are suing the US government for their rights to large tracts of Georgia (with China's support) and the Baptist News Network is struggling to survive in the face of Reverend Stonewall's infamy. Keith Hartman paints a remarkably plausible picture of the United States 24 years in the future, full of humanity and rife with startling glimpses of humor. Gay private eye Drew Parker and his Wiccan partner Jen Grey are hired by Skye Phillips, the Plot Coordinator of the hit show Czechmates. Skye wants to know what her boyfriend, the hunk movie star Charles Rockland, is up to. Although she fears she won't like the answer, she is more afraid that he is in trouble over his head. Meanwhile, Drew's old friend Daniel believes he has met the love of his life in the shadowy character of Vincent Jett. While _Gumshoe Gorilla_ lacks some of the brilliance of his first book, _The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse_, it is nevertheless a very good book. First, it's a well-written mystery that kept me guessing to the very end. Second, it's a fascinating view of things to come if current trends continue in American society. This book contains very little violence. It has "adult situations" but they aren't explicit. While this book is a sequel to _The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse_, it does not contain all of the same characters and can function as a stand-alone novel. It also leaves some plot lines open, so there will probably be another book to follow.

Fun, entertaining, book!
I read this book in about 2 days. It's a good, fast read. The plot moves quickly and the character development is just enough to make you really like them. There are some parts of the book that touch on some deep, intense subjects, such as testing for a �gay� gene, and political/religious ethics. I like the fact that the author doesn�t spell everything out. He assumes the reader is of average intelligence and can put 2 and 2 together. Although the mysteries aren�t that hard to figure out, the fun is in how the characters deal with them. My favorite character is "Jen" the witch. Not just b/c we share names... but she is Wiccan and has a wicked sense of humor. I would love to see a book just about her. My ONLY complaint is that some of the story lines were left hanging at the end of the book. Maybe that was on purpose to pursue them in the next book. I am definately doubling back to read his first book, The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse.