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It’s madness, and part of Polari’s WTF Friday features. Darren Hayes, drag queens, gross indecency and words of wisdom! …

“This week it looks like Darren Hayes has a stalker whilst other readers are getting philosophical and also quite abstract. “

[rating=4]
246 pages • Quartet • June 7, 2012 [PB]

Allan Massie’s Dark Summer in Bordeaux, the sequel to Death in Bordeaux, is a worthy successor.

“Massie evokes this increasingly unstable society exceptionally well and provides the reader with a real sense of the anxiety and insecurity that must have ruled the lives of all who lived in Pétain’s ‘French State’.”

[rating=4]
260 pages • Quartet • June 01, 2011 [PB]

Tim Bennett-Goodman takes pleasure in Death in Bordeaux, which charts the working and personal life of a police detective from the fall of France through the establishment and early days of the Vichy Republic.

Massie doesn’t shrink from the casual homophobia of the times. Even the most sympathetic of his characters find homosexuality impossible to comprehend, if not actually repellant.