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Josh Aterovis is back at doing what he does best – writing young adult detective novels with a mystical and gay romance slant. His latest title, A Kind of Death, introduces a new, young private investigator who is grappling with a missing persons case while learning about his gift of “sight,” which was passed down from his Irish ancestors who had a powerful connection to ancient Samhain traditions.
For fans of Aterovis’s Killian Kendall series, the characters and themes will be familiar. In fact, the book feels like a spinoff from that gay teen PI/ghost whisperer universe. Like Killian, the lead man, Cav, was taken in by two surrogate gay dads due to a tragedy with his biological family. The setting is the mid-Atlantic region, here Baltimore and its environs. Cav was hired by a private detective agency at an unusually young age and has to balance work and college, where he’s studying criminal justice. Cav also has a connection to a hidden spiritual world, which aids him with his sleuthing. Aterovis’s previous Killian Kendall series explored Native American belief systems. The Cav Crawford series delves into Gaelic pagan practices, which is what makes the story unique.
Cav gets set up with quite an intriguing case. Four teenage boys went missing after sneaking out late at night to go ghost hunting, and then one of them, Gareth, is found ambling along a country road, covered in blood which is not his own. Gareth remembers practically nothing about their ghost hunting adventure, not even where it took place or what happened to his friends. But given the circumstances, he’s a person of interest for the local police, and his parents hire Cav to sort out what happened that fateful night and hopefully exculpate their son.
We learn early on that Cav is not your typical college student. He lost both his father and mother as a child, and he inherited the ability to see and communicate with ghosts through his mother’s Gaelic roots. Further, his boyfriend, Mason, was the victim of an unsolved murder just one year ago. As Cav gets oriented to the case, his connection to the supernatural world quickly comes to bear. While interviewing Gareth, Cav senses the amnesiac boy might be possessed by an otherworldly entity. Shortly thereafter, Mason shows up in Cav’s bedroom, and he similarly has no answer to what happened on the night when he was killed. Cav is still grieving Mason’s death, thus the situation stirs up two major issues of unfinished business. How did Mason die, and can or should Cav move on from their relationship?
Aterovis packs in abundant material for stretching Cav’s starter installment into a series. While Mason has returned to disrupt Cav’s attempt to come to closure with their relationship, he also meets a classmate, Kyreh, who he wouldn’t mind getting to know better. Figuring out that situation will take some time, and Cav’s hands are too full with Gareth’s case to go looking for answers to Mason’s murder in this first book. But one can see those storylines making for good material in the future.
Thus, readers may forgive that there’s a heck of a lot going on in this one novel. The detective procedural storyline is quite complex in and of itself. Once Cav identifies the abandoned house that the missing boys were exploring, he discovers a connection to an unsolved triple homicide that happened there over forty years ago. Cav needs to solve that case in order to solve the case he’s being paid for, and meanwhile he has a lot to learn about his abilities as a medium. Luckily, he has his Irish grandmother to teach him her knowledge of Samhain practices, as well as his World Religions professor who happens to be a witch. Those storylines about ancient mysticism are imaginative and engaging, and meanwhile there’s the open question of what Cav’s going to do with a real life romantic interest while his ex isn’t ready to move on to the afterlife.
A fun read for fans of gay YA as well as mystery and paranormal readers, and a promising opener to a new series.
Reviewed by Andrew J. Peters
Out in Print: Queer Book Reviews 