Those of you who have read my reviews of gay works over the last few years know that I get very frustrated over the fact that the plots rarely vary. The story is either about somebody who is HIV+, gets HIV, knows somebody who has it or is dealing with it in some other form or another. Of course, the other story type seems to be "gee, I’m single and I hate it and nobody loves me or accepts me," but then again your average Harlequin novel is about the same.

When I began to read Dorien Grey’s latest novel, The Dream Ender, I thought perhaps this was going to be another novel added to my To Be Annoyed By pile. However, partway into it, I realized this was going to be much better than your stereotypical gay/HIV novel.

Up until now, Grey has made every attempt to keep the time and place settings of his Dick Hardesty mystery series extremely vague. His last novel, The Role Players, gave readers an idea that the novels might be set in the 1980’s. This time around, there can be no doubt. From the start of the book, the characters are living under the veil of a new ‘gay cancer’ that seems to be spreading throughout their community. No treatments, no detection and no name exist for this mysterious illness, but friends, partners and family members are all being struck down.

Grey’s protagonist Dick Hardesty is hired by a club owner to determine who is spreading rumors that are hurting his business. Seems that rumors are flying that someone is deliberately spreading HIV to people who are having random encounters in the darker, cruise areas of the bar.

If that had been the sole mystery of the novel, I think this book would probably have failed completely. It’s not too hard to figure out ahead of time who the culprit probably is. Grey takes the mystery a further step, however. Upon revelation of said person, suddenly everyone wants him dead. In fact, it isn’t long before the person who all suspect has been passing the disease through unsafe sex ends up dead himself, and by murder rather than illness. With one of Hardesty’s friends under heavy suspicion for committing the crime, Hardesty soon finds himself on a quest to clear his friend’s name and bring the real murderer to justice.

This is Grey’s first mystery release in a number of years, since the Lambda-nominated author moved from his previous publisher to Zumaya. As mysteries go this is, overall, a well-realized success. They mystery aspects of the story are strong. A keen sense to detail keeps the reader firmly ensconced within the time period, such as the fact that Hardesty has to keep calling people back because not everyone has an answering machine. The process through which Hardesty approaches his investigation is methodical, well-paced, clever and minus a lot of head-scratching leaps of logic that seem to encompass so many mystery novels being cranked out by the big publishers these days.

Having said that, there is one aspect to this book that, in my opinion, detracts from truly enjoying this book. Several novels back, Grey introduced a character named Jonathan, who settled into domestic bliss with protagonist Hardesty. A couple books later, and they had taken in Jonathan’s nephew to raise. I’ve never been a big fan of this introduction, and it’s particularly poor in this latest release.

In the past, Jonathan has had a bigger role in the novels, a sort of Nora Charles to Hardesty’s Nick. In other gay mysteries where the couple is partnered (see Stevenson’s Third Man Out, for example), time is taken to develop both the relationship between the two characters and to weave them into the mystery storyline. In this novel, Jonathan has been pretty much reduced to a footnote. He pops up here and there for a sexual tryst or two, but otherwise is virtually nonexistent. Unfortunately, Jonathan’s removal from the novel is replaced by entirely too much presence of the aforementioned nephew.

Had Grey focused solely on the mystery in this book, I would say it would be considered a rousing success. However, every time the novel flashes to domestic life, it consistently interrupts the reader’s flow of energy. The mystery is getting hotter, then hotter, then suddenly doused with a bucket of cold water as the story leaves the mystery and focuses instead on the nephew getting his appendix out. Interesting interviews with possible suspects that really make the reader think are suddenly stalled out by Hardesty stopping to do Story Time. None of these scenes add any real value to the overall mystery, and gave me a sense that the mystery had been written first, with the domestic scenes sort of thrown in afterwards like so much descriptive parmesan cheese on top of a big plate of al dente spaghetti with homemade sauce.

An 11th hour plot point involving a motorcycle is also very odd, and gave me the feeling that perhaps Grey wasn’t satisfied with his original ending. It’s a little too convenient, and I found that it too was a letdown after having made it through the novel. The ending is a little muddled, and left me with a feeling of ‘ok, so that’s it?’ Instead of ‘wow…can’t wait for the next one!’

In the end, this certainly isn’t the worst installment in the Hardesty series, but it is a very uneven one. Great beginning and middle, tepid conclusion and horribly distracting domestic scenes may annoy some readers, but fans of the series will be happy with the return of Grey’s series.