A Bob and Marcus Mystery: Winter by H.N. Hirsch; Asheville, North Carolina: Pisgah Press; © 2025; ISBN 9781942-016960; 200 pages; $22.95.
SAN DIEGO – This mystery novel portrays the tranquil marriage of a gay couple in San Diego while detailing the back-rubbing and back-biting at an academic institution, fictitiously set at UC San Diego. During his teaching career in our city, the author, Harry N. Hirsch, was a member of both communities and writes with verisimilitude. He is now on the faculty at Oberlin College in Ohio.
Bob Abramson, an attorney, and Marcus George, a professor, have been faithful to each other for some 18 years. Both are Jewish, are loving parents to 11-year-old Lily, and indulgent owners of a pet dog, Zelda. They were the subjects of Hirsch’s three previous novels, Shade, Fault Line, and Rain.
After Marcus finds Chuck Silver, a controversial colleague, dead in a campus building, he is retained by the colleague’s widow, Emma (also a professor) to assist private detective Jason in an investigation parallel to that being conducted by the police.
Marcus learns that the victim, Chuck Silver, a flamboyant heterosexual, had intimate relations with numerous women, some at UC San Diego, others whom he would meet at the regular gatherings of such academic groups as the Modern Language Association. Bed-hopping, in this telling, is almost as prevalent in academia as the mandate to publish or perish.
In their search for the identity of the killer, Marcus and Jason uncover the details of Silver’s nation-spanning sexual affairs.
Meanwhile, Marcus’s husband Bob has been psychologically unmoored by the death of his father; the potential resignation of a trusted junior partner at his law firm; and the advent of his 40th birthday.
The story also tenderly portrays how Bob and Marcus parent their precocious daughter, Lily. She is bored at school where she is a star student, and is something of a card shark, at least in gin rummy.
This novel, in summary, is a whodunnit with lots of gay humor as well as a portrait of a marriage undergoing stress.
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Donald H. Harrison is publisher and editor of San Diego Jewish World.