Nathan Aldyne: 4 books

Like the rest of this cracklingly witty, fast-paced series, Slate is set in an exuberantly pre-AIDS world, when to be young, attractive, and the owner of a successful gay bar was a dandy thing indeed. Clarisse has hauled her dainty posterior off to law school, Valentine has opened Boston’s grooviest...

Last in the delightfully funny Valentine-and-Lovelace series, Canary finds our two protagonists a bit the worse for wear. Their bar is losing money, largely because someone keeps insisting on leaving dead bodies around. The cops, this is the 1980s, after all, are not wildly interested in the gay community’s...

Daniel Valentine, a gay bartender, and his straight friend Clarisse Lovelace, a real estate agent, are the investigative duo of this set of four light mysteries set in Boston in the 1980s, all named after a color. In the first of these, Vermillion, the two investigate the murder of a 19-year old gay male hustler.

Daniel and Clarisse are summering in Provincetown (he is tending bar and she working at a gift shop) when Clarisse discovers Jeff's body on a beach. "Cobalt" is the color of Jeff's arresting eyes, and those eyes have made him both a lot of friends and quite a few enemies. Which of these killed him?