Episodes

This podcast adapts in classic radio drama form the Henry Rios mysteries, a series of crime fiction, featuring a gay, Latino criminal defense lawyer named Henry Rios.

Season 1 presents Lay Your Sleeping Heading, the first novel in the series, set in 1982 in a fiction university town south of San Francisco, where Rios becomes romantically involved with a young man named Hugh Paris who entangles him in the murderous secrets behind a legendary California fortune.

This podcast includes gay characters, strong language, and adult situations.
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The last episode answers all questions about Hugh’s death except one.

Hugh’s mysterious great-uncle John Smith, reveals the identity of Hugh’s killer but Rios is not convinced.

An unexpected death throws a wrench into Rios’s investigation.

Rios finds an unexpected ally, new love and big trouble.

Rios’s investigation exposes the nineteenth-century annihilation of Chinese railroad workers behind Hugh’s family’s fortune.

A retired law professor provides Rios with crucial information.

Rios’s investigation into Hugh’s death earns him a threat and a warning.

Stolen documents and mysterious injuries on Hugh’s body in autopsy photos convince Rios he knows who killed Hugh and why.

Rios is abducted, drugged and dumped in an alley near a legendary gay bar from which he calls Grant Hancock.

Rios’s search for answers about Hugh’s death leads him to Grant Hancock, Hugh’s prep school classmate and one of the last people to see Hugh alive. 

Reeling from his lover’s death, Rios refuses to believe that Hugh’s overdose was accidental.

While waiting for Hugh to return to Linden, Rios gets shocking news.

Hugh reveals painful details of his life as a rent boy supporting his heroin addiction.

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Rios nurses Hugh after he overdoses on heroin following a traumatic encounter with the father he told Rios was dead.

Hugh turns up at Rios’s apartment in the middle of the night with a story Rios doesn’t believe and an offer he can’t refuse.

His encounter with Hugh Paris at the jail leads Rios to make a momentous decision.

In the summer of 1982, Henry Rios is a young public defender working in Linden, a small town thirty-miles south of San Francisco. Linden is home to the great university founded by railroad magnate Grover Linden at the end of the nineteenth century. Rios, who is gay and Latino, was born and raised in California’s central valley, and is from a working-class Mexican-American family. He is a graduate of Linden and its top-ranked law school. In episode 1, Rios, driven to drink by professional setbacks and personal demons, is working the jail rotation. He meets Hugh Paris, a young man the police have arrested on drug charges outside a gay bar. For both men, the encounter will be life changing.