Gay erotica/ historical saga.
Mystery surrounds young hunk Tab when he steps off the bus in the small, historical harbor town of Shernhaven, Massachusetts. How is he so quickly able to perceive the dark underbelly of the town-and what is it that he's putting his "handyman" skills to changing, or "fixing," or, at least, to shaking up? How can he know that the seeds of what the town is underneath its picturesque veneer go back to its founding three hundred and seventy years before? And to the men who founded it.
When Tab steps off the bus onto the town's Braintree Road and immediately catches the speculative attention of Shernhaven's leading banker, Trevor Cole, is it chance or is it part of something deeper?
The Handyman toys with the concept that the sexual proclivities of men can be passed down through the generations as it follows the history of American immigration into a small New England seaport town through the arrival and establishment and interrelationships of six founding families. Shernhaven is a man's town in every sense of the word and becomes so from the unique input of the men who have arrived in Shernhaven to establish their presence from the very beginnings of the United States.
Arriving in 1640 with a land grant from the English king, Charles I, three families, those of the Sherns, Coles, and Geers manage to establish a place in history for themselves in Shernhaven. The aristocratic Sherns have ruled, by right, from the town's founding, and their men share an interest in cruelty in the taking, down through the generations. The original founders of the Cole and Geer families arrived in more servile fashion, and not just in their social status, but they also manage to establish themselves in enduring prominence and power in Shernhaven.
Spice is added to the mix when the slave trade becomes a mainstay of the Shernhaven economy in the mid eighteenth century, and Kweku, the original black stud arrives in Shernhaven from the African Gold Coast by way of Jamaica. His descendants become the always-ready and enormously satisfying men of the Semple family. Exhaustion from a half century of wars bring the Germans, in the form of the Fischer family, the men of which have an obsession for punishment, to Shernhaven in the early nineteenth-century and some thirty years later the potato famine in Ireland introduces the Irish to the town, represented by the Dungans, with their puritanical streak. Nearly four hundred years of the churning and melding of all of the sexual obsessions of men for other men in the town of Shernhaven inevitably results in complications and tragedies that come to a head in the late 1990s.
Ten years later the handyman, Tab, strides into this mix and slowly, but surely, the whole sexual power structure of Shernhaven begins to shift.
The last mystery is how and why-and to what end is the handyman working?
