Review of “Boy Toy”By Michael CraftFour stars“Boy Toy” is the third of what I think of as the “Dumont Novels,” and the fifth of seven in Michael Craft’s Mark Manning series of murder mysteries. Set in Dumont, Wisconsin, a fictitious small city that is nonetheless familiar to me from my one and only foray into that lovely, lake-filled state, “Boy Toy” moves the reader along in the development of three separate threads in Mark Manning’s life. There is his evolving relationship with Neil Waite—the handsome young architect who seems ready to do whatever he needs to do to make Mark happy; there is his evolving relationship with Dumont itself—as both the steward of a large local printing fortune and the owner/publisher of the respected local newspaper; and, most interestingly to me, his evolving shared role with Neil as de facto parents to his seventeen-year-old cousin Thad Quatrain. And it is this adopted gay parenthood—insofar as it existed in 2001, when the book was published—that is most central to the murder narrative in “Boy Toy.” (Note: my husband and I adopted two babies in 1996, from opposite sides of the world; so I have some history we being a gay parent.) Since Craft seems to enjoy putting some oddball context for his murders into these books, he’s done so this time with mushrooms. Yep. Mushrooms. Just as we learned about the world of miniatures in “Name Games” (a topic, oddly enough, with which I have a good bit of familiarity, through my day job as a museum curator); we learn a good deal about mycology in “Boy Toy.”But the title of this book is linked to a complex, and ultimately disturbing thread that winds its way through the story. Even as we see Neil and Mark become closer as partners, and as we see them both become ever more loving and good parents to a teenager, we also see uglier aspects of what it is to be gay in America. For once I didn’t fully anticipate the outcome until the very end: the double surprise of the denouement was logical and satisfying, but almost blindsided me. This installment in the Mark Manning series is seen by the author as the most successful of the first five—following the idea that the writer gets more comfortable with the character as he controls his evolution as a fictitious human being. Craft’s writing has gotten less tentative, less stilted, as the books have progressed, and that growing ease is reflected as well in his main character’s personality. Mark Manning, who comes out late after decades of self-repression, has become increasingly comfortable in his skin, and increasingly proud of who he is as a gay man. The plot twists in “Boy Toy” would have been beyond the coping skills of the Mark Manning we first knew in “Flight Dreams.” I didn’t like that first Mark Manning—both smug and neurotic. But the Mark Manning who gives his all to protect the young man he and his partner have taken on as a surrogate son is someone whom I would be proud to call a friend.
