Mirage City

The fourth installment in Rosen’s series featuring gay ex-cop turned private investigator Evander Mills (after Rough Pages) marries the rousing action of a well-built procedural with fascinating tidbits of queer history. In 1950s San Francisco, an anxious member of the local chapter of the Mattachine Society, one of the first gay rights organizations, comes to Mills’s office above a gay bar and asks him to track down three members who’ve stopped attending meetings following a rift within the national organization. Evander heads to his hometown of L.A. to check out the group’s new headquarters and look into a secret gay biker club’s possible involvement with the case. Once there, he’s unable to avoid his estranged mother, whose new nursing job seems to be tied up in the investigation. Rosen has a blast toying with the conventions of L.A. noir, but this is more than pale Raymond Chandler pastiche—it’s a smart, gimmick-free puzzle that stands on its own. The real magic, though, is in Rosen’s depiction of the struggles and triumphs of midcentury queer life: he highlights pockets of LGBTQ+ resilience, including Evander’s San Francisco community and emergent gay subcultures in L.A., without painting the past in too rosy a light. This series deserves a long life. (Oct.)