by J. F. Gonzalez

That's why it's interesting to note that Fetish is quite a bit tamer, quieter than his usual level of hyper-realistic grue and depravity. There's some of that to be found in Fetish, to be sure, but it's a more restrained Gonzalez we see here, perhaps an experiment in toning down the subject matter to avoid inciting outrageous reactions. There's still plenty of tough and disturbing detail, but it's spread a lot thinner, and it alternates with a gritty, more realistic police procedural approach, resulting in an effective sort of '80s-'90s LA noir.

Detective Daryl Garcia hates gangs and their loser members due to what happened to his first wife. He'll do anything to arrest any gangbangers on his beat, LA's seedier, post-riots environs, and coerce confessions from them. He and his partner are not above planting evidence, concocting confessions, and intimidating both witnesses and perps. But when it becomes clear that a serial killer is stalking gang members from across the board—hitting all different gangs in the area—the police find themselves plagued with a dual problem. The killing spree is heating up tensions in the Latino community, where each gang thinks their homies are being murdered by rival gangs. If the killer isn't caught and shown to not belong to a gang, the territory could erupt in open warfare. On the other hand, a serial killer operating with impunity on the hot streets of LA gives the police and politicians a black eye, even if the victims seem to be mostly of the throwaway variety anyway. But the potential PR nightmare hangs overhead.

In this intriguing milieu, Gonzalez presents Garcia as a man whose hatred for gangsters has to be tempered in order to work with them and their defenders, like Father John Glowacz and ex-gangbanger-turned-counselor Danny Hernandez. Daryl meets Rachael Pearce, a hungry investigative reporter with true-crime book ambitions, and the two begin to work the case separately but together, Daryl from the police task force and Rachael by following up previous out-of-town killings ascribed to the same murderer. As their relationship intensifies, so do the numerous killings, and suspicion begins to fall on cops and other neighborhood mainstays. Meanwhile, more victims are found dismembered, their limbs added to the grisly death catalog. The book becomes an exercise in misdirection, with glimpses of the crimes and the main suspects multiplying but leading the reader in wildly different directions. As Daryl chews on the data, even he becomes a suspect in the spree, which swirls ever closer to a climactic confrontation even as the murderer's identity seems to shift and blur.

While ultimately satisfying, Fetish is not without some minor flaws. Perhaps a little too realistically, pacing lags in the middle as Daryl and the police are stymied and the investigation bogs down—but the suspense lags a bit, as well. On a technical level, Wildside could have proofed the manuscript much more closely. But these quibbles aside, J. F. Gonzalez presents an alternately taut and disturbing thriller which plays with the reader's preconceived notions and mimics reality by airing and using the characters' own biased views of others to great effect. The result is a cerebral mix of horror and social commentary which, rather than pandering to reader expectations of over-the-top action, manages to effectively explore the generalizations often used to paint people we don't like with the same broad brush, proving that the truth is by nature an uncomfortable fit.