Purchase Wedding Season on Amazon! Click here!
Local TV personality Rosa Rivera’s series on Bay Area weddings will end with a contest. The winners receive a lavish same-sex wedding ceremony to be broadcast live from Arts restaurant on Rosa’s show. Artie thinks this will be his big chance to revive his singing career.
Excerpt from Wedding Season:
Tim ran for miles in his dreams that night. He ran around Lake Nokomis and Lake Harriet and Lake of the Isles. He ran past the Calhoun Beach Club and south along the shore of Lake Calhoun. When he looked down at his bare feet in the sand, there was no more blood. He ran west out of Minneapolis past the corn fields and farmyards of Minnesota. By the time he crossed the South Dakota Badlands his little boy’s feet had grown to the size of a teenager’s. He ran across the Rocky Mountains and soon he could smell the salt spray of the sea and hear seagulls scolding him. They might be screaming about Jesus too, but Tim didn’t listen. He was standing in the sand and the bandage was gone. He looked up toward the sun and the water and now he was a man with a man’s feet standing beside the Pacific.
Wedding Season: A Beach Reading Mystery
Mark Abramson
Summertime—and the reading is easy, especially with Abramson’s fifth Beach Reading novel, featuring old friends Tim Snow; his hunky boyfriend, Nick; Tim’s Aunt Ruth; and Tim’s Mom. Wait! Tim’s Mom isn’t a friend—she appears in an opening nightmare bedeviling our hero, and, like an avenging Norn, permeates Tim’s waking and sleeping thoughts throughout the novel. Reality TV harpy Rosa Rivera is keen to sponsor a gay wedding contest in Arturo and Artie’s restaurant. Nick and Ruth’s boyfriend, Sam, are talking marriage, and indeed, the whole world (the Castro) is rife with wedding bells, warm hearts, and cold feet. But keep an eye on the homeless lady wobbling through this idyllic tale: Why is Aunt Ruth so suspiciously solicitous?
Ethan Boatner – Lavender Magazine, Minneapolis
WEDDING SEASON: A BEACH READING MYSTERY
by Mark Abramson
Despite the black cloud known as Proposition 8, many folks in the Castro are excited about upcoming weddings, including that of Aunt Ruth and her boyfriend Sam. The marriage madness cranks up when the owners of the Arts restaurant, where Ruth works part-time as a bartender, learn that local overbearing TV
personality Rosa Rivera wants to sponsor a gay wedding contest there, with the winner to receive a televised ceremony in the restaurant, plus a free honeymoon.
Ruth’s nephew Tim, a waiter at the restaurant, is pressured by his partner Nick to consider entering the contest, while Tim’s psychic dreams bring up some disturbing memories of his abusive mother, whom he hasn’t seen in years.
Fifth in the “Beach Reading” series of well-written light mysteries, this one is especially interesting in that it provides considerable background information on Tim’s childhood, and it delightfully illustrates the “extended family” of Tim and Ruth’s friends, co-workers and neighbors, who band together to teach someone
a rather amusing lesson. Don’t miss it … five stars out of five!
– Bob Lind, Echo Magazine