Lion’s Head Revisited
Overview
A case brings PI Dan Sharp to the northern Ontario wilderness, where he has to face his own dark past.
When a four-year-old autistic boy disappears on a camping trip, his mother is reluctant to involve the police. Instead, she calls in private investigator Dan Sharp after a ransom demand arrives.
On investigating, Dan learns there are plenty of people who might be responsible for the kidnapping. Among them are an ex-husband who wrongly believed the boy was his son; the boy’s surrogate mother, now a drug addict; the boy’s grandmother, who has been denied access to her grandson; and a mysterious woman who unnerves everyone with her unexpected appearances.
A trip to Lion’s Head in the Bruce Peninsula, where the boy disappeared, brings Dan unexpectedly into contact with his own brutal upbringing. But when a suspected kidnapper is found dead, Dan suddenly finds himself chasing the ghosts of the present as well as the past.
Reviews
Reading Lion’s Head Revisited is like watching a time bomb in its final minute. With characters made of equal parts compassion and stone-cold criminality, this book is a bullet.
This is as good a whodunit as we’ll see this year.
[Jeffrey Round’s novels] not only give gay readers increasing representation in the world of crime fiction, but offer straight ones a reasonably complex glimpse of a community they’ll likely find isn’t especially different from theirs — except, presumably, for the murderous parts.
Dan Sharp, the protagonist, is one of Round's key achievements, vividly brought to fictive life.