While forty-nine-year-old Will Christian is on a routine bike ride, he spots a group of buzzards in a field with their heads buried in something Will doesn’t immediately recognize. His substantial curiosity and an inability to walk away from things he doesn’t fully understand cause him to take a closer look. When he discovers that the buzzards’ food source is a human body, he gets sick. The gruesome image of this feathered flock hovering over the ravaged body of a young man plagues Will night and day. Burning off energy at the gym, burying himself in his work, and immersing himself in cooking his favorite meals do little to erase the haunting memory. Even meeting José—the man who he believes could be person he could spend the rest of his life with—isn’t enough for him to un-see this awful vision.
Two subsequent murders soon rock the small town of Mañana, and when Will finds out that he and the deceased men have something in common—all being Latino and gay—he knows he has to help bring to justice whoever is responsible. First he connects with Lieutenant Reed, lead detective on the cases, and with Reed’s blessing, assumes the role of amateur investigator. After he interviews the victims’ family members to get more information about them, he becomes active on an online hook-up site for gay men, believing this is where the victims may have met up with their killer. When a couple of the men who respond to Will’s solicitous posts on the site are men he knows and would never have suspected to be interested in such a hook-up, Will realizes no one can be above suspicion. In the meantime, Will and José hit it off from the moment they meet, and their relationship quickly escalates to their spending nights with one another. Their closeness leads to José becoming involved in Will’s quest to solve the murder mysteries until something in Will’s gut warns him that his seemingly perfect lover may not be who he portrays to be.
Author Bill VanPatten weaves together all the right story elements of a good mystery in LOOKS ARE DECEIVING. Several skillfully planted red herrings spur Will and others away from identifying the murderer and aid in intensifying the suspense that leads to a surprising, dramatic ending. Along with this, VanPatten cleverly drops throughout the narrative a trail of subtle, yet evocative clues extracted from the killer’s very own thoughts, controlling the amount of useful information doled out to readers in a very creative way.
Bill VanPatten keeps the cat-and-mouse murder mystery plot in constant motion in LOOKS ARE DECEIVING, gradually accelerating the pace as it moves closer to amateur investigator Will Christian solving the crimes.
~Florence Osmund for IndieReader