Today on the site I’m thrilled to be helping Michael Nava reveal the cover of the newest book in his award-winning Henry Rios mystery series, Lies With Man, releasing from Bywater Books’ new Amble Press imprint, which is helmed by Nava himself! (More on that later this month!) Lies With Man releases on April 27th, and the author’s sharing more about it here:

Evangelical Christians and right-wing Republicans push a ballot initiative to forcibly quarantine people with the HIV virus in the eighth Henry Rios novel, Lies With Man, by award winning mystery writer, Michael Nava. Set in Los Angeles in 1986, Rios, a gay, Latino criminal defense lawyer, agrees to represent members of a militant gay activist group called QUEER (Queers United to End Erasure and Repression) who are fighting to defeat the ballot measure with civil disobedience. When a fundamentalist church is firebombed, killing its pastor who supported the initiative, Theo Latour, a member of QUEER is arrested for the crime. And Rios suddenly finds himself defending a client facing the death penalty.

But, in the tradition of the best noir novels, and nothing is as it first appears. As Rios delves into the case, shocking secrets emerge about the victim, Rios’s client, QUEER, the highest echelons of the Los Angeles Police Department and the young man Rios falls in love with. Although set 30 years in the past, the themes of Lies With Man – the Christian right’s assault on LGBTQ people, a community overwhelmed by an epidemic, and police misconduct – could have been taken from today’s news. Lies With Man proves again what the Los Angeles Times said about a previous Rios novel: “Nava’s mysteries are set apart by their insight, compassion, and sense of social justice.” Or, in words of The New York Times Book Review, “Nava is one of our best.”

And here’s the explosive cover, designed by Ann McMan!

Buy it: Bookshop | Amazon | B&N | IndieBound

Michael Nava’s Henry Rios crime novels have won seven Lambda Literary awards for gay mystery. He is also the author of The City of Palaces, a historical novel set at the beginning of the Mexican Revolution of 1910. In 2001, he was awarded the Publishing Triangle’s Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award in LGBT literature. He currently serves as the managing editor of Amble Press, an imprint of Bywater Books. Amble Press publishes LGBTQ writers and is particularly interested in publishing queer writers of color.