Review: `I read a lot about this. It's a sexually transmitted disease.'
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 05 26, 2014
Polish born author Mendy H. Hopkins makes an auspicious debut with his first novel UTOPIAN HELL. Now a US citizen and having served in the secret service, Hopkins has gather more fodder for exciting books that hopefully will follow this exciting debut. He is a man with heart, style and conviction and dares to write about a subject, AIDS, that remains controversial - perhaps less so now that the richly important book and play by Larry Kramer - THE NORMAL HEART - has finally been placed before the television public in a stunning presentation.Hopkins takes a different and equally important stance on the 1980s plaque that all phases of government refused to acknowledge in the beginning. He makes the introduction of the unexplained deaths of young gay men into a mystery set in San Francisco. And to make the ghastly plaque more poignant he uses a female detective, Detective Sandy Sommers, to investigate the horror. Interestingly enough Detective Sommers is called into the case when the illness begins to strike women. This is a stroke of fine investigative parody that for Hopkins works very well: make the world ignore a scourge `destined as punishment for gay men' until the virus strikes women. At the same time he allows his lead detective to have a fiancé, Brad West  - a factor that helps balance the story as a romance as well as a mystery.Well written, compact in its message and unwinding, UTOPIAN HELL is an important addition to the literature to draw attention to a plague that still remains as a serious illness and a topic of controversy 35 years later. Grady Harp, May 14