Title: Fault Line
Author: H N Hirsch
Genre: Mystery
Book Blurb:
“Fault Line is a suspenseful and utterly gritty crime fiction book. The plot is intelligently crafted, and ... thoroughly satisfying.”
--The Onlinebookclub.com
Bob Abramson's first encounter with murder occurred four years previously, in 1985, when his roommate, the scion of an old Boston family, was murdered and the case was investigated by the victim's Harvard professor, Marcus George. As the investigation developed, Bob and Marcus, naturally, fell in love.
Now, Bob has completed law school and landed a job as an Assistant District Attorney in San Diego, and Marcus has accepted a new position at UC San Diego. As they settle in to their new home, they're thrust into the investigation and its political ramification, and they find that a gay subculture roils much of southern California's placidly straight surface.
Excerpt:
On his first day in California, Bob Abramson awoke to an earthquake, rain, and murder.
The clock radio went off just as a mellow California voice was announcing “a small earthquake.” For a moment Bob felt completely disoriented, didn’t know where he was. His heart raced.
He quickly glanced at his Filofax, open on the bedside table. Saturday, July 8, 1989. He remembered where he was and what he was doing in this strange room with suitcases and boxes spread out all over the floor. He took a few deep breaths.
Marcus must have set the alarm, although why, Bob couldn’t fathom.
Bob had flown in the night before. Marcus had scurried to come out a few days sooner to meet the movers, who arrived ahead of schedule from the East.
He pulled himself out of bed and wondered what you were supposed to do after an earthquake. Having grown up and gone to school on the East coast, he was terrified of earthquakes, not to mention mud slides and fires, all the things he knew were possible in Southern California beneath the placid, gorgeous surface.
He glanced around the room and nothing seemed to have moved, then peered out the window. A drizzle was coming down but everything was still in place, all the houses and lawns and cars neat and tidy, just as they had been when they looked at the house a few months before.
His panic subsided.
He looked at the clock radio: 6:30. The mellow voice was explaining that the quake was “only” a 3.2, nothing to worry about, no damage reported. He trudged to the bathroom, tripping over an open suitcase.
When he came out he could smell Marcus’s scrambled eggs. He pulled on gym shorts and a T shirt as he walked into the kitchen. He kissed the back of Marcus’s neck and announced “we’ve had a small earthquake.”
“You mean last night?” Marcus smiled. Having been separated for a few days and exhausted with packing for a week before that, they both had been more than ready for sex.
Bob smiled. “No, a real one. It was on the radio. 3.2. I guess that counts as little. No damage. But what is this rain? I thought this was sunny California.”
Marcus chuckled as Bob added pepper to the eggs. Marcus always forgot the pepper.
“It’s called June Gloom,” Marcus said. “Someone explained it to me. The desert east of here heats up fast as warmer weather arrives, pulls in mist from the ocean, so for a while there can be gray skies or drizzle.”
“My first day, rain and an earthquake.”
“Don’t be a grouch. There’s coffee. This will be done in two minutes.”
Bob poured himself a cup and stood at the open door to the patio. He peered out at the yard of their new house and inhaled: orange blossoms, sweet and a bit soapy. Freshly cut grass. The drizzle felt peaceful.
He smiled again. He could get used to this, he thought to himself. The air was never sweet in Boston. If you were lucky, it didn’t carry the smell of car exhaust.
He heard a thump at the front door and realized Marcus must have started delivery of the local newspaper. He retrieved it, and as he walked back into the kitchen, pulled it out of the blue plastic wrapper. He opened the paper and was stunned by a huge headline in bold type:
MAYOR’S HUSBAND FOUND DEAD
What he didn’t know is that in just 24 hours, he would be knee-deep in the investigation of that murder.
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Open internationally.
Runs August 1 – 31, 2023.
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Author Biography:
A graduate of the University of Michigan, with advanced degrees from Princeton, H.N. Hirsch is the Erwin N. Griswold Professor of Politics Emeritus at Oberlin College in Ohio, where he also held a joint appointment from 2005-2014 in Comparative American Studies; served as Acting Chair of the Department of Politics in 2010-2011; and was Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, 2005-06. He began his career at Harvard, where he was Head Tutor in the Department of Government; he later served as Director of the Legal Studies Program at Macalester College in Minnesota; and chaired the Department of Political Science at the University of California at San Diego and at Macalester. He is the author of "Office Hours: One Academic Life" (2016); "A Theory of Liberty: The Constitution and Minorities" (1992); and "The Enigma of Felix Frankfurter" (1981/2014); and editor of "The Future of Gay Rights in America" (2005). Among his areas of expertise are constitutional law and jurisprudence, modern political theory, and gender and sexuality.
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