A Cult's Deadly Deeds

 Tribe
by R.D. Zimmerman
Dell Books, 277 pp. 

Homophobia (internalized and societal), religious zealotry, sexual identity, and parental love are the themes dealt with in Tribe, R.D. Zimmerman's latest mystery novel.

Set mostly in Minneapolis during a blizzard, Tribe has two storylines: a mysterious death on a university campus and a cross-statelines hunt. Both involve in one way or another the novel's central character, Todd Mills, an award-winning TV reporter whop hasn't "worked a day since his lover Michael had been murdered and the scandal of their relationship broadcast on all the media."

Tribe opens with a prologue that is a flashback of Mills's undergraduate days at Northwestern University, near Chicago, where he witnesses the falling death of Greg, a fraternity brother. Shortly before the fall, Greg, "the guy from the room next door had been spying on Todd and his friend Pat from outside the dorm room window. Catching them in a moment of intimacy, Greg shouts, "Homo alert!" Mills in a panic flees the room leaving Pat to face to face the consequences. The question  that has haunted Mills into middle age is: Was Greg's death an accident or murder? If it was murder, who was the culprit--Pat or someone else?

The prologue segues into Chapter One which brings the reader to the present day. Janice Grey, an attorney and Todd Mills's college friend, sits in her car parked in a "snow-whitened parking lot," waiting to meet Zebulon, the son she gave up for adoption. He and his infant daughter, Ribka, are on the lam from a fanatical Colorado religious cult called The Congregation. They believe "someday the government's going to come after us" and "lay siege upon us" because "God's true church was prophesized to be tortured."

Rejecting the cult's belief in faith healing, Zeb comes to Minneapolis to leave the ailing Ribka in the care of Janice, an avowed lesbian. Although happy to be reunited with her son, Janice worries that Zeb might not be able to "handle the fact that she's a dyke."

Meanwhile, two Congregation members leave a trail of bruised and battered bodies in a frantic mission to return Zeb and Ribka to "our tribe." Equally determined are Todd and his new lover Steve Rawlins, a Minneapolis police detective, to keep Zeb, Ribka, and Janice out of harm's way.

Heightening the tension is the blizzard which both helps and hinders the good guys and the bad guys alike.

Zimmerman, the author of nine other mystery novels (including Closet), an Edgar Award nominee, outGrishams John Grisham when it comes to non-stop suspense. Plus the twists and turns of the story for the most part are believable and unpredictable. Moreover, Tribe bears out the statement by literature professor Ted-Larry Pebworth in the anthology The Gay and Lesbian Literary Heritage, that "...[T]he main impetus of post-Stonewall gay mystery novels has been the normalization of gay life. In these works, gay individuals and gay subculture tend to be demystified and robbed of their sensationalism." Here is a domestic scene from Tribe that is a good example of the normalization Pebworth speaks of: "He [Todd Mills] took another sip of coffee, then reached for the shoe box full of photographs that sat on the coffee table. Among the many things he wanted to accomplish in this, his first pause in his professional life--he'd taken his first job at a public television station just a week after graduating from Northwestern twenty years ago and had worked constantly since--was to sort through all these pictures and get them into some albums. He also wanted to paint the second bedroom that he used as his office. Get some new skates. And do some writing about what it was like to be closeted for so long in the television industry."

However, there are some flaws: Jeff, the drag queen who babysits Ribka, is stereotypically campy and over-the-top ("Batting his eyes and queening it up, Jeff said, 'Oh, I just love a man in uniform, don't you?'), the uncharacteristic use of profanity by the cult members, the frequent use of long flashbacks, and the ambiguous ending.

Otherwise, Tribe is a thoroughly engrossing mystery. That makes it a perfect book to add to one's summer reading list.

This review was originally published in the Lambda Book Report (August 1996).