Desert fabuloso

KIRKUS REVIEW

A warm, funny, urbane first novel about the town of Santa Fe and two of its most notorious citizens. Forty-five-year old John Aaron is a wealthy, gay Santa Fe real-estate investor who--on a trip to New York to help him forget the death of his father--meets the ""fatally gorgeous"" Bradley Robinson III in a Greenwich Village bar. Twenty-eight. year-old Bradley has inherited millions from his immensely screwed-up father (a homosexual who married for propriety's sake but never stopped mourning an old college lover) and is slowly drinking himself into the grave. It's love--of a kind--at first sight, and John takes Bradley back to Santa Fe to live with him for several stormy months--until Bradley's drinking and abuse become too much. Bradley is kicked out and goes to live in an unfashionable neighborhood; in the meantime, their affair has become a cause célèbre among John's friends, with sides being taken. After Bradley fails at a suicide attempt, he and John get back together, and even weather the death of Bradley's eccentric mother, Cassie, who is run down by a car shortly after she moves to Santa Fe to be with her son. A love story with a bonus: Santa Fe comes across as a delightfully odd, gossipy, small-town kind of place, a useful counterpoint to John and Bradley's romance.