Title: The Man Who Understood Cats (#1 in the Jack Caleb & John Thinnes series) Author: Michael Allen Dymmoch (pseudonym) Published by: St. Martin's Press, 1993 ISBN: 0-312-09332-2 [hardcover, 244 pages]
Two sharply different men find themselves thrust together by a murder in this prize-winning [Malice Domestic: Best First Traditional Mystery] novel. Jack Caleb is a Chicago psychiatrist, wealthy, cultured -- and gay. John Thinnes is a streetwise homicide cop with a wife problem and a teenage son he doesn't see very often. When one of Caleb's patients is found dead, possibly a suicide, Thinnes catches the case -- if it is a case.Convinced that something about Allen Finley's death cries murder, Thinnes defies his superiors and looks for a killer, with Caleb prominently in his sights. But he remains doubtful, not because of evidence or lack of it so much as his own almost buried sensitivity to the complexities of human nature.
Discovering that Caleb is unabashedly gay, Thinnes draws back from the man, letting the common stereotype of gays take hold, yet Caleb continuously confounds that stereotype.
A series of unsettling events -- an attack on Caleb meant to seem like a self-inflicted drug overdose, the indications of an art theft scheme, and a barely failed blackmail threat to Thinnes himself -- all work to change some of Thinne's most stubbornly held concepts about Caleb, about the case, and about his own life.
Further deaths lead to a harrowing scene where the two men confront the real killer and come to a deep understanding that is a revelation to them both.
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