The Henry Rios Mysteries Books
Set in the summer of 1981, in a university town 30 miles south of San Francisco. Henry Rios, a gifted and humane lawyer driven to drink to by personal and professional demons, meets Hugh Paris, a charming junkie struggling to stay clean. Hugh tells Rios an improbable tale of long-ago murders in his wealthy family. Rios disbelieves him but the erotic spark between the two men ignites an obsessive affair that ends only when Hugh is discovered with a needle in his arm on the campus of the great university founded by his ancestor. Rios refused to believe Hugh’s death was an accident. He begins an investigation that ultimately reveals much more than the identity of the men who murdered his lover.
By the beginning of Goldenboy , Henry has become sober, finding spirituality in his recovery while becoming further engaged in gay activism. He decides to assist a Los Angeles attorney who is dying of AIDS with the defense of a young gay man on trial for killing a coworker who threatened to out him. Goldenboy probes explosive themes of homophobia and exploitation within the gay community and also introduces Josh Mandel, who will become a critical part of the series arc.
Winner of the Lambda Literary Award for gay mystery, Howtown finds Rios back in his hometown of Los Robles, California defending Paul Windsor, a boyhood acquaintance accusing of murdering a pedophile. Windsor is himself a pedophile and the police believe the murder was the result of an extortion scheme gone wrong. It’s up to Rios to prove otherwise, if he can. To do that, he has to confront the ghosts of his past that still linger in the sleepy river town. Simultaneously, the novel explores Rios’s relationship with his HIV-positive lover, Josh Mandel.
Rios defends Michael Ruiz, a young man accused of murdering Gus Peña, a powerful Los Angeles politician who had had his eye on the Mayor’s office. Meanwhile, Rios must confront the collapse of his relationship with Josh Mandel, his HIV-positive lover.
On the morning after the 1994 Northridge earthquake, Zack Bowen turns up at Rios’s doorstep with the news that Rios’s old friend, Judge Chris Chandler, has been murdered in his downtown L.A. courtroom. Zack says he was Chandler’s lover. The problem: Chandler was deep in the closet. Now, in order to defend Zack, Rios must decide how much of Chandler’s secrets–and his own–he will have to reveal. While all this is happening, Rios’s ex-lover Josh Mandel is dying from AIDS and calls on Rios to help him through his final days.
Rios, raw from the death of his lover from AIDS, becomes involved with a young man who is murdered after spending the night with Rios. Rios becomes a suspect in the murder. In the process of clearing himself, he is drawn into the search for a serial killer who preys on young gay men in West Hollywood. He finds himself up against a homophobic cop, a hostile DA and a conspiracy that reaches into Hollywood’s power elite.
After Rios suffers a heart attack, he sinks into a depression but he’s soon shaken out of it, first by the prospect of new love and then by the appearance a niece he didn’t know he had and her 10-year-old son. When his niece is accused of shooting her abusive husband, Rios takes a case that is more personal and more emotionally demanding than any other case he has ever faced.
November, 1984. Criminal defense lawyer Henry Rios, fresh out of rehab and picking up the pieces of his life, reluctantly accepts work as an insurance claims investigator and is immediately is assigned to investigate the apparently accidental death of Bill Ryan. Ryan, part of the great gay migration into San Francisco in the 1970s, has died in his flat of carbon monoxide poisoning from a faulty gas line, his young lover barely surviving. Rios’s investigation into Ryan’s death–which Rios becomes convinced was no accident–tracks Ryan’s life from his arrival in San Francisco as a terrified 18-year-old to his transformation into a successful businessman. What begins for Rios as the search for the truth about Bill Ryan’s death becomes the search for the meaning of Ryan’s life as the tsunami of AIDS bears down on the gay community.
Lies With Man is a finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Mystery 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—and 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.