Gay male murder mystery collection.Hardesty is an unusual Homicide Vice detective in Washington, D.C. Although he is a straight arrow in obtaining justice for gay rent-boys who have been done to death, no matter how powerful the perpetrator in the hedonist and power-wielding capitol city is, he is himself addicted to the very rough gay sex vice he is charged with stopping. He both protects and uses the young male prostitutes of the city. This is a collection of three works, previously published separately, in chronological order, of Hardesty's world of solving male-on-male crime while satisfying his own gay lusts for young, blond, submissive men.
In the initial Hardesty story, Gotta Keep Trying, Hardesty cruises the gay male clubs of Washington, D.C., to check out the ages of the young men dancing the poles. When he focuses on Todd, a lithe young-looking dancer with a blond Mohawk and a provocatively placed gecko tattoo marking the young man's erogenous zone, he is enticed to go beyond just checking out Todd's age. Lost to his desire and his developing determination to settle down with just one man, Hardesty pursues the young man, who, possessed by indecision and his own demons, runs hot and cold on him. When Todd turns up as a key offering on an interactive video sex site, Hardesty is forced to the edge of frustration in driving his vice squad colleagues to keep trying harder to bust the male prostitution ring and free Todd.
In the election tale, Snitches, when a U.S. senator is named as a possible vice presidential running mate, all hell breaks out in his attempt to hide that he has a weakness for sadistic sex with rent-boys. When his thugs mess up an attempt to silence one in a D.C. hotel, snitches descend on D.C. vice cop Hardesty, not a stranger to vice himself, particularly with snitch rent-boys. Hardesty's attempts to figure out what is what and who is doing who are complicated by his own partner's decision to freelance blackmail the situation and to cut down on the competition in the process. Hardesty's efforts to save the one rent-boy who isn't snitching leads him on a merry out-of-town chase.
In Retribution Christmas Day isn't being kind to D.C. Homicide Vice detective Hardesty. Called to a crime scene at the Georgetown University boathouse on the Potomac River, he is taken aback at seeing the face under the ice of a man he only hours earlier was partying with at an exclusive, full-service gay male brothel. Immediately thereafter identifying a body in a Mercedes in the boathouse's parking lot as a rent-boy from the previous evening who Hardesty has known (biblically) himself, the plot thickens as the Secret Service descends on the boathouse looking for someone else altogether. A very important and very secret personage, the owner of the Mercedes, is missing. It's going to be a very busy Christmas week for Hardesty, not just in trying to solve a murder mystery against the opposition and possible complicity of the Russian mafia and the U.S. government itself, but also in keeping his own connection to the male brothel under wraps.
