Mark Richard Zubro is one of my favorite gay writers. The books in his Tom and Scott mystery series always make me smile and laugh. They are romantic (I can’t resist handsome, rich, gay characters that are madly in love), fun, and usually fast-paced romps that keep you turning pages well into the night. However, with Everyone’s Dead But Us, Mr. Zubro missed the high mark just ever so slightly.
With Tom and Scott finally married and taking a well-deserved vacation at a secluded resort that caters only to a super-rich gay clientele, our handsome couple find themselves enmeshed in a series of gory murders that leave the island resort almost bereft of any living guests other than themselves. One by one, the super-rich gay men and their respective lovers, boy toys, body guards, or call boys are summarily executed. Tom and Scott must find out who the murderer or murderers are before they too fall victim to the nefarious killers. To complicate the matter, the murders are committed under the cover of a typhoon that completely cuts the island resort off from the outside world. And no matter how gruesome the murder, no matter how obvious it was that each of the rich but absolutely clueless guests would eventually be targeted, these callous, arrogant and supercilious A-gays continued to ignore the reality of death surrounding them.
It was here that Mr. Zubro failed to keep my sympathies. Not one of the guests cum murder victims had a shred of empathy for their fellow human beings. I felt like Mr. Zubro had some sort of vendetta against anyone with money, which is ironic considering that Mr. Zubro’s own heroes, Mark and Scott, live lives that few of us can even dream about (except when reading our favorite escapist fantasies) yet were the only characters given the opportunity to be human in the novel. The others were characterized as heartless, pathologically indifferent human beings who cared more about protecting their own closeted insularity than in protecting themselves or any of their fellow travelers. It was as if Mr. Zubro had decided that each and every one of them deserved to die simply because they had money. Well, hello. Few of us may have the kind of wealth that these über-rich may have had or have the lifestyle that Mark and Scotty have, but a lot of us wish we did.
Nonetheless, I still enjoy Mark Richard Zubro’s style and ease of writing. His main characters are people I love to identify with; even fantasize about and his Mark and Scott Mystery series is one of the best out there. I look forward to his next installment and hope for a few more sympathetic victims that I can identify with and cheer when their murderers are revealed.
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