The Fourth Courier. — Timothy Jay Smith

The author, Timothy Jay Smith, graciously shared with us notice of the upcoming release of his novel. He wrote the story “has significant gay content, including sex, though it’s not romance or erotica. The gay angle plays a crucial role in solving the case, and as such, it’s a different read for the gay community.”

He provided a concise synopsis of the plot, also, detailing the following:

In The Fourth Courier, a series of grisly murders in Warsaw suddenly becomes an international case when radiation is detected on the third victim’s hands, raising fears that all the victims may have smuggled nuclear material out of the recently-defunct Soviet Union. The FBI sends Special Agent Jay Porter to assist in the investigation. He teams up with a gay CIA agent, and when they learn that a Russian physicist who designed a portable atomic bomb is missing, the race is on to find him—and the bomb—before it ends up in the wrong hands.

The novel is set at the time of the seismic collapse of communism in Eastern Europe. This year marks the 30^thanniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and Solidarity coming to power in Poland, and The Fourth Courier captures that era. Like all my novels, I use a thriller-ish plot to examine what’s happening to real people. Jay becomes intimately involved with a Polish family, giving the reader a chance to see how people coped with their collective hangover from the communist era.

Mr. Smith produced a promotional video for the book in which he offers additional details for the prospective reader.

 

Mika and I have yet to acquire a copy and read it for ourselves, but the summary the author shared with us piqued our interest.

We look forward to giving Mr. Smith’s opus a read.

The Fourth Courier (284 pages) will be released April 3^rd in hardback, Kindle and e-book formats.

Posted by Geoffrey

Prayers for Bobby: A Mother’s Coming to Terms with the Suicide of her Gay Son. — Leroy Aarons

This book tells the tragic story of the Griffith family, of Walnut Creek, California, whose gay son, Bobby, committed suicide in 1983. He was 20 years old. The death of a young person, gay or heterosexual, is tragic in its own right, of course, but in this case, his mother, Mary, a staunch Presbyterian refused to accept him as gay. She put him through psychiatric treatment and prayer with church groups to “cure” him of his homosexuality, threatening to disown him otherwise. His struggle to understand his same-sex attraction and the pressure from his family to overcome these feelings drove him to suicide. Her son Bobby was an aspiring writer and kept a diary, documenting his experiences and feelings. The book incorporates Mary Griffith’s experience before and after her son’s suicide and entries from his diary. Their story was made into a movie for television in 2009, Prayers for Bobby, in 2009, featuring Sigourney Weaver as Mary Griffith and Ryan Kelley as her son Bobby. The film is well worth watching, though it tugs at the heartstrings.

Their story is compelling and stresses the importance of suicide prevention for gay youth. Suicide among young gay people is a reality that this book brings home to the reader. In fact, gay youth are at higher risk of suicide according to many surveys. Mary Griffith cannot bring back her son Bobby, but in sharing the story of her family’s tragedy and in campaigning for acceptance of gay youth, through her involvement with PFLAG, he lives on. PFLAG, founded in 1972, reaches out to families with young gay people, like her son Bobby, who are struggling with their identity to help them through the experience and keep them from harming themselves.

Mary Griffith learned the hard way it was her ignorance of what her son Bobby was experiencing and her inability to question her Church’s intransigent doctrine concerning homosexuality that proved fatal to him. She realized too late that while it is essential in her Christian faith to care for her son’s soul; it was equally necessary to care for him in accepting him for who he was in the here and now. To her credit, Mary Griffith came to understand she was mistaken in what she believed and sought to atone for this. In examining her conscience and her understanding of Christianity, she becomes an ardent supporter of gay rights and working with the organization Parents Families and Friends of Lesbian and Gays (PFLAG). Mary Griffith cannot bring back her son Bobby, but in sharing the story of her family’s tragedy and in campaigning for acceptance of gay youth, through her involvement with PFLAG, he lives on. PFLAG, founded in 1972, reaches out to families with young gay people, like her son Bobby, who are struggling with their identity to help them through the experience and keep them from harming themselves.

Posted by Geoffrey