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paul_cornelius's review
5.0
Amazing! Almost forty years ago from the time I'm writing this, JHC almost, just almost, wrote an LGBTQ mystery thriller! And a sympathetic one at that. Hand Me a Fig Leaf is one of Chase's better works. And not just for the surprise reading of sexual identity that runs throughout it, but also because it is so well plotted and designed. It has a rhythmic quality to it, struggling for heights of reason and then falling into valleys of discordant clues. Published in 1981, this novel is one of JHC's last--he only wrote four more novels after this, before his death. Still, he was coming up with new ideas and new approaches. He didn't go stale! This, even though for the past few novels before and including Hand Me a Fig Leaf, the structure has been the same. With an eight chapter template (and sometimes an epilogue) to flesh out the plot. Yes, JHC had become something of an assembly line. But it was an assembly line that could always come up with a new twist on things. Chase may have been getting older, but his work wasn't.
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