Assault with a Deadly Lie

August 4, 2014
If most readers should be able early on to figure out the motive, if not the villain, in this novel, that doesn’t make Raphael’s eighth Nick Hoffman mystery (after 2007’s Hot Rocks) any less compelling. One warm May evening, police burst into the home of Nick Hoffman, an Edith Wharton scholar at the State University of Michigan, and haul off his partner, Stefan, with no explanation. This is but the first of a number of terrifying acts of harassment and intimidation. Throughout, Raphael deftly comments on the rights and freedoms lost since 9/11: everyone is suspect, and a militarized police force often stands above the law. Occasional references to pricey household appliances and fashions serve as reminders of the characters’ priorities pre-SWAT visit. Most interesting is the impact on two educated upper middle-class gay men in a seemingly idyllic college town and their terror in realizing how easily lives can be destroyed.

October 1, 2014
Professor Nick Hoffman (Hot Rocks, 2007, etc.) learns that even tenure can't guarantee real security.Fortune has finally smiled at Nick. He's now a full professor, thanks in no small part to a gift from a former student to Nick's employer, the State University of Michigan. The bequest, establishing a prestigious speaker's series, has named Nick the sole administrator of a $25,000 annual grant. While other faculty members are crammed into cubicles, Nick has his own office suite, complete with administrative assistant. He and his partner, SUM's writer-in-residence Stefan Borowski, along with their West Highland terrier, Marco, live in a splendid center-hall colonial in Michiganapolis, purchased in part with the proceeds from Stefan's best-selling book about his conversion from Judaism to Catholicism. Stefan's now at work on a second memoir, Fieldwork in the Land of Grief, about the trauma he sustained when a student he'd accused of plagiarism hanged himself outside Stefan's office. That trauma, however, is small potatoes compared to Stefan and Nick's current nightmare. First, their home is invaded by a SWAT team in armed personnel carriers, acting on a vague tip that the pair may be holding someone hostage. Stefan is arrested, strip-searched and jailed. Their boss, Dean Bullerschmidt, threatens to fire them for creating bad publicity. Someone smashes their laptop and leaves road kill on their bed. Their neighbor, whip-smart defense attorney Vanessa Liberati, a New York transplant, offers her help. But their true salvation comes from Stefan's mentor, Father Ryan Burke, who provides a solution that would gladden the heart of any NRA member. What looks at first like a sensitive exploration into competing values ends as an exercise in might-is-right. Raphael, co-author of Stick Up for Yourself: Every Kid's Guide to Personal Power & Positive Self-Esteem (1999), should know better.

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October 1, 2014
Is this Nazi Germany or the quiet university town of Michiganopolis, home to crime writer Raphael's recurring heroes, Nick and his longtime partner, Stefan, whose parents survived the Holocaust? Himself the child of Holocaust survivors, Raphael portrays with frightening power the wrenching experience of victimization by the corporatized, PR-prioritized groves of academia, where both men teach, and by local authorities militarized into SWAT teams practicing police brutality. After an unnamed accuser utters the word terrorists, Nick is forced facedown onto his front lawn, hands cuffed behind him, as commando types search his house. Police had polluted my home. . . . I'd never recover . . . our assumptions that life was solid and safe. Being ripped from our lives . . . into an alternate reality is just the beginning, as Rafael impressively increases suspense as hostility from the university, terrified of bad publicity, mounts. The compelling core of this unusual novel is Raphael's depiction of the agonizing reality of victims' shame, in which someone feels doubly exposed talking about the violation and so says nothing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)