Androgynous Murder House Mystery
Steven Rigolosi
Reviewed by Tom Morton
Steven Rigolosi’s new
mystery
novel, Androgynous Murder House Mystery,
(Ransom Note Press, June 2009), is the third book in Rigolosi’s Tales From the Back Page series and will
keep you guessing in
more ways than one.
The brief description given by
Ransom Note Press reads, “Six friends gather at the Long
Island
estate of independently wealthy snob Robin Anders, but only when the
group
returns home to Manhattan
does a
murder take place. Robin decides to investigate, while the reader must
figure
out a larger mystery: are Robin, Lee, Chris, J, Alex, and Law male or
female,
straight or gay?”
After surviving a series of
bizarre, near death experiences in Long Island, Robin, the
pill-popping,
neurotic, narcissistic narrator of the story, finds that one of his
friends is
murdered, most likely by one of the other friends in his small
ménage.
The story is exceptionally well
written and highly enjoyable as we follow Robin in the investigation.
Not only
trying to puzzle out who committed the murder, the reader must also try
to
puzzle out which of the six is male, and which female, as well as
gender
preference. The characters are beautifully describe in such a manner as
to get
a good mental picture of what they look like, but never in such a way
as the
reader can tell the gender of any of the six, including Robin.
The genius behind this being that
as the book is written in the first-person narrative, the use of
language keeps
the reader wondering even about the narrator! Rigolosi did a
magnificent job
using language that kept the story moving at a fast pace while never
letting on
to the bigger questions of gender and gender preference. While in the
long run
the answers to these questions truly don’t matter, it is still a page
turnning,
highly enjoyable who-dunnit.