Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, July 29, 1990                   TAG: 9008010065
SECTION: HORIZON                    PAGE: C-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Reviewed by JERE REAL
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WEARY DETECTIVE GETS MIXED UP WITH NEO-NAZIS

Dave Brandsetter, the California-based gay detective (actually an insurance investigator), is back in his 11th outing from writer Joe Hansen. This time he's mixed up with a bunch of Neo-Nazis.

One knows the sort: the types that hero-worship Hitler and the SS on weekends and engage in private para-military training on private preserves. These groups have been in the news lately in Idaho. So it seems inevitable that the feckless Brandsetter would run into such a group sooner or later.

As always, Brandsetter gets into some violent confrontations, this time with some "skinhead" storm-trooper types who are led by a white supremacist named George Hetzel. Curious cultural fact: Why are "skinheads" in the U.S. often anti-gay, while in the United Kingdom, many "skinheads" gay?

This mystery begins with the death of a young man, Vaughan Thomas, who is mysteriously killed while playing "paintball" in a wooded preserve set aside for these fake war games. It turns out that Thomas, however, had been mixed up with Hetzel's para-military unit, thus Brandsetter is asked to look into the boy's death. The adventures proceed from there.

There is one annoying aspect to this novel. The actual villain turns out to be (and I'm not about to reveal the ending) someone who has been treated only in passing, which always seems to me something of an easy "out" for the author.

Nonetheless, this mystery is a good summer read when both time and the weather are heavy upon you. Hansen is always capable of evoking his particular Southern California milieu, and his weary (now retired) investigator will, one hopes, keep coming out of retirement to take on more cases.