STRACHEY'S FOLLY

No doubt it’s an honor to have your square included in the AIDS Memorial Quilt, but one Maynard Sudbury thinks it’s a little premature in the case of his long-ago lover Jim Suter (“1956-1996”), who isn’t dead yet, or even HIV-positive. And Maynard’s friend Donald Strachey (Chain of Fools, 1996, etc.) can’t help wondering about the import of one design element in Jim’s square—several pages of Jim’s old campaign bio of right-wing Pennsylvania Congresswoman Betty Krumfutz, especially when Krumfutz is spotted surreptitiously ripping the pages from the square, and Maynard, a foreign correspondent who’s survived Hanoi and Beirut, is shot outside his D.C. apartment later that day. Who could’ve been in such a hurry to bury Jim Suter? Strachey and his lover Timmy Callahan take a closer look at the background of this marvelously unprincipled writer-for-hire and discover any number of people, sporting a nicely variegated bunch of motives, who’d lift a cheerful glass to his passing. In fact, the main mystery here, given the number of corpses past and future—Stevenson is still spinning out complications as the final curtain’s descending—may be why Jim Suter hasn’t died yet. Solid, satisfyingly paranoid plotting, marred only by its tendency to save the juiciest secrets for the very last act.