Gumshoe Gorilla [Paperback]

Set in 2025 Atlanta, this sequel to Hartman's first novel, The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse (2001), features gay detective Drew Parke, his Wiccan partner Jennifer Grey and a large supporting cast of strange people. Like its predecessor, it employs the same irresistible zaniness and wit, multiple viewpoints, high sexual content (both gay and straight) and cheerfully chaotic narrative technique. Jennifer is hired by a young deaf-mute named Skye, who wants to find out whether her boyfriend, Charles Rockland (an actor, and one of five cloned hunks), is cheating on her. Meanwhile, Drew's sidekick and sometime lover, Daniel, is in trouble with the law. In both cases, it turns out that there's extremely nasty blackmail behind the troublemaking what might be called a family feud in real life. Add to this a band of Cherokees trying to get back Georgia, while lurking in the background are dueling televangelists, each with his crop of the ambitious or the thuggish (you expected the devout?), and it's obvious that the author has produced another engagingly weird novel of the near future, satirizing everything he can get his word processor on and doing most of it extremely well. In the absence of conventional narrative, readers can instead enjoy jumping from good part to good part. (Nov.)nominated for a Lambda Award in both the mystery and SF/fantasy categories.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

2024 was a rough year for Drew Parker. His car broke down, his rent went up, and his partner was kidnapped by a revenge-crazed performance artist with a grant from the NEA. Worse, one of his clients had been tossed off a sky scraper-after being stripped naked, smeared in human fat, and painted with occult symbols. Drew himself had broken into the headquarters of the Christian Militia on a wild goose chase, and nearly gotten his brain fried trying to get back out. And then there was the assassination attempt on that cross dressing Cherokee Shaman, which Drew might not have stopped if he'd known how much trouble it was going to get him into. And that's not even counting the talking gorilla in the fedora. So far, 2025 isn't shaping up to be much better. What had started as a simple case involving identical quintuplet actors cloned from the frozen corpse of a dead movie star was suddenly getting complicated. The pushy stage mom was to be expected, but the secret agents from the Cherokee nation came as a bit of a surprise, as did the lethal martial artist in the clown mask who had broken into his office. Nor had Drew planned on finding himself in the middle of a political death match between competing tele-ministeries. Besides, Drew had a personal score to settle, a little matter involving a privatized version of the KGB, a ring of male prostitutes, and a vampire sex cult. Oh well, at least his Wiccan partner, Jen, is back to help him out. If he can just get her to cut back on the practical jokes and the dating advice.

Keith grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, which in addition to being "Rocket City USA" also has the distinction of being one of the few cities in America ever captured by a Russian general. (Or so the story goes. Alot of really odd things happened during the Civil War.) He graduated from Princeton University, then went on to study at the London School of Economics, then started a PhD in Finance at Duke University. Sometime around his third year of the finance program, he realized that he really didn't want to spend the rest of his life teaching MBA's how to screw each other, and ran away to become a writer.

His first book was Congregations in Conflict, an examination of nine different churches and how they dealt with the issue of homosexuality, sometimes in surprising ways--like the Southern Baptist Church which voted to marry two gay men, the order of seventy year old celibate monks who all came out of the closet together , and the Black Catholic church which expelled its gay organization in order to be more "inclusive". The book was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, and Keith appeared as a guest on NPR's Talk of the Nation in conjunction with it.

His second book, The Gumshoe, the Witch, and the Virtual Corpse is one of those novels that really confuses book store owners, because they can never figure out which section of the shop to put it in. The critics have alternately described it as science fiction, mystery, social commentary, magic realism, and even a coming of age story. It won two Spectrum Awards for science fiction, was picked as one of the "Eight Best Mysteries of 1999" by The Drood Review of Mysteries, and was a double nominee for the Lambda Literary Awards in the "Men's Mystery"and "Science Fiction / Fantasy" categories.

Over the years, he's also choreographed dance pieces, written and acted in radio dramas, worked as a theater critic, and even spent a couple of years performing with the Princeton Mime Company. Keith currently lives in West Hollywood with his boyfriend Scott and his cat Urvashi, named after a Hindu Goddess whose principal duties consist of lounging around and letting the world admire her beauty. His hobbies include juggling, RPG's, and falling down in interesting ways.