Mirage City (Evander Mills, #4) by Lev A.C. Rosen Narrator: Vikas Adam
Format: audiobook, eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical mystery, mystery, noir
Series: Evander Mills #4
Pages: 272
Length: 9 hours and 15 minutes
Published by Macmillan Audio, Minotaur Books on October 7, 2025
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads
Lev AC Rosen delivers a new and captivating 1950s mystery in this dazzling, award-winning series
Private Investigator Evander “Andy” Mills’ next case takes him out of his comfort zone in San Francisco—and much to his dismay, back home to Los Angeles. After a secretive queer rights organization called the Mattachine Society enlists Andy to find some missing members, he must dodge not only motorcycle gangs and mysterious forces, but his own mother, too.
Avoiding her proves to be a challenge when the case leads Andy to the psychological clinic she works at. Worlds collide, buried secrets are dug up, and Andy realizes he’s going to have to burn it all down this time if he wants to pull off a rescue. With secret societies, drugs, and doctors swirling around him, time is running out for Andy to locate the missing and get them to safety. And for him to make it back to San Francisco in one piece.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
My Review:
Los Angeles is possibly the ultimate ‘mirage city’. Not only does it appear in the heat haze of the California desert as a mirage, but what we think we see and know about it is a mirage created by the Hollywood star-making machinery that has painted the city as the place where there’s a movie star on every corner and one’s own dreams of stardom can come true.
Andy Mills isn’t there for that. For him, LA is a mirage that takes bits of his own past growing up in the city and sweeps over them with the way that LA has changed and grown and reinvented itself in the years since he left. Sometimes he sees the places and the people he left behind, and other times he sees nothing that seems familiar at all.
Then again, Andy lived his own mirage of a life in LA, and for several years after in San Francisco, when he lived his life for his job as a police detective, and pretended very hard to be straight. It’s only in the past year, exactly a year, since the events of Lavender House, that Andy has, as he puts it, lived openly in the shadows of queer life in the city he now calls home, San Francisco.
This case, the case of three missing queer people with tenuous connections to an early gay rights organization, the very real Mattachine Society, leads Andy back to LA – no matter how much he’d really rather not go, AND how very conflicted he is about whether or not he should see his mom while he’s there.
Because the Andy Mills that his mother knows – and is still talking to – is definitely a mirage. He loves his mother and he wants to keep her in his life. Which means keeping her away from the truth of his life – a labyrinth that is one hell of a lot easier to navigate when she can’t see his face while he’s lying through his teeth.
Something she was always a bit TOO good at for his comfort. In the middle of a case, it’s exposure that he REALLY can’t afford. But he might have to risk it anyway. Because his case and her job as a nurse at a pricy mental health clinic have crashed into each other’s reality in a way that pushes Andy into a situation where the best way for him to keep his secret and his relationship to his mom is to let her in on it.
Because if he can’t open her eyes to his truth, he can’t maintain what little they have. Not if her job is to facilitate the torturous treatment of men just like him.
Escape Rating A-: I listened to Mirage City, as I have every book in this series so far, and I have to confess that I’d willingly listen to Vikas Adam read my grocery list – and quite possibly your grocery list as well. He’s become the voice of Andy Mills that’s in my head even when I’m reading parts of the story myself. What’s a bit odd is that the picture of Andy that I have in my head is Oscar Isaac (and I don’t know why) but he sounds like Vikas Adam.
Audiobooks are wonderful that way, and the Evander Mills series has turned out to be a special treat because of it.
The story in Mirage City doesn’t stand alone – because a good chunk of the framing story for the case, Andy’s life in San Francisco, hangs over his head from beginning to end. He’s been at the Ruby for a year, no longer a cop and no longer pretending to be anyone or anything other than he is to anyone who matters to him. He’s become a part of the queer community in San Francisco instead of acting like a straight cop unless he’s looking for a hookup.
The only person in his life who doesn’t know who he really is is his mom. Which is where his worlds collide. Which also reminds him that he doesn’t want to celebrate a year of this new life because he doesn’t feel like he deserves to be celebrated – no matter how many people he’s helped.
He doesn’t think one year of helping makes up for all the years he stood by and watched his own people get hurt by the cops. So he’s dealing with a crisis of conscience about the party planned in the honor he doesn’t think he has, even as he’s in the midst of a different kind of crisis over if and what to tell his mom.
So the story in this one is split along multiple axes, and that’s what made it so fascinating to follow. Andy has a giant case of the “I’m not worthies” when it comes to his personal relationships – and his ambivalence about seeing his mom and the possible consequences of THAT certainly play into it. He doubts himself, and he doubts himself a lot and all over the place.
At the same time, he’s in the middle of a case that directly helps the queer community, which is part of his personal redemption even if he doesn’t feel like he’ll ever get there. As a case, it’s a frustrating mess. The person who hires him is so caught up in strictly obeying the rules that she believes keep her ‘safe’, or at least as safe as she can be, as a lesbian in a society that punishes same-sex relationship with prison or abusive mental health treatments or both – but she’s not safe at all AND not of much help in a case where she needs to give Andy the information he needs in order to find her missing people – but she seems incapable of giving it.
So he’s far from home, looking for people whose names he doesn’t have and whose appearance he only has the vaguest outline of, with a client who acts as if the skills she needs him for are contaminating her with their unsavoriness. That the case inevitably dives into even lower and worser places – at least from her perspective – isn’t any surprise at all.
I did figure out what was happening long before Andy did, and I had moments of wanting him to get on with it. At the same time, because Andy’s somewhat wilful blindness fed right back into the situation with his mom, I could see why his investigative instincts kept shying away from the terrible truth.
This series rides or dies with Andy’s point of view – and that’s more true than ever in this fourth installment. We’re seeing the world through Andy’s eyes, and hearing not just what he hears and says, but also the thoughts he keeps behind his teeth because they’re either too dangerous or, and this is frequently the case, too revealing. So, as much as Andy may not like himself a lot of the time, it’s hard not to like him and want him to get and/or keep it together.
In this particular story it’s definitely to keep it together, as he’s not the only one in danger and he’ll have to keep his head and keep his story intact until he can ride off into the sunset. That he leaves his mom behind, with her mouth hanging open, finally figuring out all the stuff that SHE’S been willfully blind about for years leaves the story not exactly on a cliffhanger but rather teetering on an edge between hope and resignation.
A resolution I can’t wait to find out about in Andy’s next case, hopefully, fingers crossed and everything, this time next year.
