10 GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE November 23, 2001

WORLD AIDS

DAY

FESTIVAL 2001

SATURDAY

DECEMBER 1, 2001

11:00A.M.5:00 P.M.

Lakewood Civic Auditorium 14100 Franklin Boulevard $10.00 Admission

Tickets on sale at Ticketmaster (216) 241-5555

Musical Performances

11:30a.m. 12:30 p.m.

1:00 p.m.2:00 p.m. 2:30 p.m. 3:30 p.m. 4:00 p.m. 5:00 p.m.

Stagalag Reggae Band African Soul Michael Jantz DrumPlay and Daniel Thompson

Featuring World Music DJ Kris Koch

Enjoy vendors representing countries & cultures from around the world.

AIDS

TASKFORCE

OF GREATER CLEVELAND

This event will raise awareness and funds to benefit the AIDS Taskforce of Greater Cleveland. Questions? Please call Judy Price at 216.621.0766 ext. 337

evening'sout

The Preble County Strangler

returns to haunt Ohio

Murder at Willow Slough

by Josh Thomas

Writer's Club, $24.95 trade paper

Reviewed by Anthony Glassman

Josh Thomas is a name recognized by many a longtime gay Ohio resident. He is the former editor of Gaybeat, a biweekly newspaper published in Cincinnati, and later Columbus, during the 1980s and 1990s.

Thomas has written nonfiction books on religion, serial killers and

travel. He returns to his roots with Murder at Willow Slough, a suspense novel about a string of murders and the gay reporter who helps police solve the crimes and bring down the conspiracy behind them.

The murders are based on a case that Thomas called the Preble County Strangler in his Gaybeat stories about it. The killer picked up men at Indianapolis gay bars in the late '80s and early '90s, and later dumped their bodies near I-70 in Preble County, Ohio and Wayne County, Indiana.

Police had few leads until five years ago, when Herbert Baumeister's son found a skull on their Indianapolis estate. As investigators dug up six more bodies, Baumeister fled to Canada and killed himself.

The fictional guilty in Willow Slough don't take the easy way out, though.

Jamie Foster, a former model and jet-setter, is taking care of his ailing mother and getting over the death of his lover

more akin to preaching to the choir. Thomas shows great potential as a suspense writer. There are distinct flashes of Richard Harris-like brilliance here, bringing to mind the evil exuding from the pages when Hannibal Lecter did something naughty. There are twists and turns aplenty. There are secrets within conspiracies, and many of the characters are not what they seem to be.

However, then the author often slips into preaching again. Or, he takes a side trip into some bizarre nature-loving phantasmagoria.

Murder

when another body turns up. Unlike the others, dumped along freeways in Ohio and Indiana, this one is located a few miles from his mother's house. The killer is sending him a message, continuing a game of cat and mouse that the reporter and his prey have been playing for way too long.

Foster contacts Sgt. Kent Kessler of the Indiana State Police, trying to see if he can be of any assistance to the investigation. Kessler is trying to pull together the tatters of a task force that was almost formed to investigate the murders years before. Foster might be just what Kessler needs, since none of the police agencies know their way around the gay community.

As a friendship develops between the two men, neither truly trusting the other, danger closes in and a traitor in their midst might cost either his life.

It's a decent book, although at 527 pages, Thomas has proven himself to be something of a sadist. Thankfully, it is far easier to read than many other similarly long novels, most of them written in the 1800s by Russians.

It is, at times, a very engaging book. At -other times, however, the book slides into proselytizing, and Thomas does not seem sure who his readers are. Admittedly, when editing and writing Gaybeat, it was pretty obvious whom he should be writing for. With this novel he might have to broaden his aim.

However, beyond a certain point, the repeated references to looking at the victims as people and not as gays and how gays are just like everyone else goes beyond the bounds of hedging one's bets and become something

WILLOW SLOUGH

JOSH THOMAS

There is an extremely long stretch between bringing down the main conspiracy behind the murders and the brief, almost offhand closure of the final loose string. Here, Thomas decides that we really want to see more of Foster's love life, with dialogue sugary enough to cause some readers to rush for their insulin.

Another problem is that Thomas occasionally slips the narration into vernacular that should be reserved for dialogue, or at least the characters' quoted thoughts. Some characters seem to speak in very low-brow ways, despite their being highly educated.

There are a couple of easy explanations for the unevenness of the novel. First, he could have written it a little at a time over a number of years, and been in different mindsets at various points in writing. Second, he could have been making a lot of it up as he went along, and might not have been sure exactly where it was going. This sort of stream-of-consciousness writing can work, but the audience for it is limited.

Regardless of the reason for its unevenness, the book is still quite engrossing, and its semi-fictional nature can send a little shiver up the spine. Someone was killing hustlers and underprivileged gay men in Indianapolis and dumping their bodies elsewhere. It's unsettling. The fact that it is uneven does not detract enough from the book to keep it from being a worthwhile purchase.

It will be interesting to see if Thomas writes out more fiction, smoothing the rough edges. He could be a truly excellent suspense writer, given some polish.