J.R. Rain, Silent Echo

J.R. Rain's Silent Echo is kind of a strange read. On the one hand, it's very repetitive. A few facts are drummed into the reader's head: the protagonist, Jim Booker, is dying from AIDS-related cancer (though he's not gay); he's being cared for by an almost saintly friend, Numi, a Nigerian who is gay; Jim needs Numi's help but is uncomfortable about being the recipient of his ministrations because Numi's a gay male. On the other hand, despite the repetition, Silent Echo winds up being highly readable. Perhaps this is because it's pretty short (though it arguably should have been shorter). Perhaps the repetitive bits just make the story go down easily because you don't have to think about them much. The story, by the way, is that Jim is a private eye specializing in lost persons cases—or at least he was before his illness debilitated him. In Silent Echo he winds up investigating a series of murders, a case which, if he solves it, could bring him some closure before death: he's been burdened by guilt related to one of the murders for more than twenty years. So, not a bad read, all in all. It makes me a bit curious to see how Rain's other novels compare.