The Less-Dead (review)

Narrator Noah Nordstrom has spent his sixteen years steeped in Evangelicalism, since his father is the Bible Answer Guy on a radio station heard all around Austin, Texas; however, Noah is increasingly skeptical of some of his parents' beliefs. While helping his friend Carson pursue an attractive new member of the Youth Group, Noah falls in with Will Reed, a gay classmate from their school, who is just about to age out of the foster-care system without anywhere else to go. Will soon realizes there's no romance in the offing, but he does initially accept Noah's invitation to stay temporarily at their home. Though clearly uncomfortable with Will's sexual orientation, Mr. Nordstrom nonetheless extends hospitality, particularly since there's a serial killer on the loose who's targeting homeless gay teens, and there's some cause to believe that the killer might even be one of the regular callers to the Bible Answer Guy. When Will begins to doubt his welcome, he heads back to the streets and is murdered, leaving a distraught Noah to set about finding the killer. The murder mystery story, somewhat clunky in its construction, feels like a thin cover for Lurie's larger agenda, an examination of the fraught relationship between evangelical tenets, Christian charity, and gay rights. Teens with more than passing familiarity with gay-themed literature will find many of the positions stiffly articulated by various characters to be old hat, but, as Lurie implies in her author's note, she writes with an evangelical teen audience in mind, even providing them with a series of rebuttals to "the six 'clobber' passages that so many evangelical teachers quote to support their hard stance against homosexuality." While not entirely satisfying as a mystery tale, this may be welcomed by teens who are struggling to determine just where they stand on issues of homosexuality and religion.