Review: Meth, Murder and Bedtime Stories...
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 04 27, 2013
It had been quite a while since I'd read "Breaking Cover," Kaje Harper's second novel in this (so far) series of three. So, as I settled into "Home Work" I struggled to remember the context in which I found Tony Hart and Jared (Mac) MacLean. It tells you something about Harper's narrative skill that you don't really need to know all of the deep and complex back story to enjoy this book for what it offers: a sometimes tense counterpoint between a domestic drama and a police crime procedural.This third volume gives you more than enough of the back story - with plenty of new enrichments - to make it stand fully on its own as a novel. Harper beautifully draws out for us the relationship between Tony and Mac, as they figure out how to make their family - cobbled together from broken bits of other lives - thrive. Being a parent isn't easy, but being a gay parent when your relationship is new, the kids are already school-age, and one of the parents is a driven homicide detective raises issues never touched on in "Modern Family" (much less the "Leave it to Beaver" of my own childhood).I always marvel at my favorite straight women writers who can create authentic portraits of gay male lives - lives that feel as real to this middle-aged gay parent as my own does. The balance of romance and whodunnit, of domestic angst and police work is deftly handled. The whole current cultural issue of gay marriage is woven into the plot in a way that makes it feel entirely inevitable and necessary.It is too bad, in a way, that Harper's wonderfully-written love scenes between the two protagonists removes her work from so-called mainstream literature.  Gay sex is still such a societal bugaboo that it (theoretically) eliminates a whole pool of readers who, I truly believe, would be as moved and as enlightened by Tony and Mac's life as I was.  I'm really looking forward to book four in the series.