Blood Count

At a time when gay communities were hidden worlds, Crang needs to root out a killer and do his best to right a grave wrong.

At the height of the AIDS crisis in the early nineties, a close friend of Crang’s, Alex Corcoran, loses his partner, Ian, to the disease. After Ian’s death, Crang is enlisted by Alex to find the man who infected Ian. Crang searches for theman to prevent Alex from getting himself in trouble. However, when Alex is murdered, Crang owes it to his friends to find their killers.

The case, which explores the gay scene in Toronto at a time when LGBT culture was still very much a hidden world and open persecution was commonplace, ends up involving a cabinet minister afraid of being exposed.

A clever political mystery, Blood Count is also an emotional and moving story of a couple whose lives are devastated by AIDS and a community damaged by the prejudices of the world around them.

Jack Batten, after a brief and unhappy career as a lawyer, has been a very happy freelance writer for many years. The author of forty books, Batten has reviewed jazz for the Globe and Mail, and, for twenty-five years, reviewed movies on CBC Radio. He currently writes the biweekly “Whodunnit” column in the Toronto Star. He lives in Toronto.