Customer Reviews

The Dream Ender (A Dick Hardesty Mystery)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

For Dick Hardesty fans, this book will add another chapter in the maturing family life of the heroes. However, the most significant and chilling part of this novel is the reflection on the emergence of HIV/AIDS and how our community responded...not very proudly at first, but in light of current management, the past expectations have been justified. The latest resurgence of the disease, based in part upon a smug confidence in therapy, makes the retelling of this early story very timely. Dorien is to be congratulated for tackling a difficult subject and weaving it around his usual community snapshop of characters.

In many ways, Dorien Grey's The Dream Ender is a fairly typical, workmanlike mystery, but Grey gives it a twist that sets it apart from other mysteries: he sets it in the early 80s, when AIDS was a horrifying plague on the gay community. He takes it one step further by imagining a very real villain, who is deliberately spreading the virus to others via a popular leather bar's back room. The murder in the book almost takes a back seat to the intriguing--and horrific--prospect of a very deliberate grim reaper moving through the gay community of an unspecified American city. A very moving and satisfying read.

Little was known about it in the 70's; even its name, AIDS, was just beginning to be recognized as a new terror. There was no test to determine its presents. Some are carriers and don't know it, while the medical world searches for answers--men are dying.

Was the rumor that someone was deliberately spreading the disease true? If so it wasn't a crime--to the law at any rate, not yet. Or was the rumor spread only to close a popular gay bar and destroy its owner? Dick Hardesty is hired to find out.

This book has strong overtones and undertones of the gay life. What it was and what it became because of the treat of AIDS. But its more--there's murder and mystery. In truth this is not a book I would normally pick up to read, but maybe because AIDS has touched my family as it has so many others, I found the story compelling and I had to read it to the end. Not for everyone, but it should be.

Review by Wanda C. Keesey (author of Lost In The Mist release date May 2008)

The best book in the Dick Hardesty series. A very moving and profound gay mystery centered on the beginnig of the AIDS crisis. It's astonishing how Mr. Grey lets his characters grow from book to book.

The story is set in the early 1980's, at a time when the impact of AIDS was first manifesting itself, especially in the gay community. Dick Hardesty is a private investigator who is hired by the owner of a local leather bar, whose business is being ruined by rumors that someone there is intentionally spreading the infection, mostly through the "back room" sexual liaisons which the bar used to allow. When the implicated modern-day "Typhoid Mary" is unexpectedly shot and killed, one of Dick's friends is arrested for the crime, after it is discovered that the bullet came from his gun, which he claims was stolen. Working with a local attorney, Dick investigates possible leads as to who the real killer might be. This is difficult to do, since most everyone in the gay community considers whoever killed the HIV spreader to be a hero.

It took a lot of guts for the author to tackle this storyline, spotlighting a time when most members of the gay community were as misinformed as most people about the spread of AIDS, as it continued to claim scores of otherwise health, active individuals. This is a time that those who lived through it would likely not want to remember, for no other reason that it would bring up all the feelings of those lost to the disease. Younger readers, meanwhile, would find it hard to believe the misconceptions, hysteria and fears of that time, before testing was commonplace and we had a better idea of how the disease was spread. Perhaps it isn't just a coincidence that the author decided to broach this subject at a time when many younger gays are getting lackadaisical about necessary safe sex practices, leading to unnecessary spreading of the infection.

As usual, the story is well-written, with realistic, warmly drawn characters and situations, with an engrossing, plausible mystery to solve. Kudos, and four disco-lit stars out of five.

Dorien Grey continues to develop his characters, which we fans have all come to love, with verve and panache. This is a worthy addition to the Dick Hardesty series, and I anxiously await the next one.

"In the early years of the AIDS crisis, death stalks. Is some one purposely spreading AIDS? Dick Hardesty needs to find out, and from there,with some unexpected plot twists, the story unfolds. A dark and painful tale, of sorrow, death, and murder. More than a mystery, The Dream Ender is also a tale full of hope as the main characters grow and mature and continue to respond with love to the cycles of life. Although The Dream Ender stands alone as a well written mystery, it is as well an engrossing chapter in the continuing Dick Hardesty series. I eagerly await the next in the series."

As a gay man who lived (literally) through the early days of the AIDS epidemic and panic, I thought I would find this much more poignant and interesting. But I didn't find it that at all. It was the first of the Dick Hardesty mysteries I've read, and I don't plan to read any more. Not really terrible, it didn't really grab me. Seems a little overwritten at 212 pages, a few grammatical errors and more than a few typos were a distraction, and I really didn't feel that drawn into the lives of the main characters.