Not long into Slave Trade I found myself wondering what I was doing reading a novel about pederasty and male prostitution…. The whole thing is in the private eye genre. Sid Kasdan is wry, glib, and underwhelming. He is also rather boring even though what happens to him can hardly be construed as tedious….

He is hired by an international ring that supplies very vulnerable young men to very invulnerable old ones…. His job is to escort the escorts all over the world to their appointed destinations and when possible to do a bit of recruiting. The fact that he even considers doing it produces the novel's minor tension. He does have some reservations about it which produces a little bit more.

Slave Trade has been heralded as a detective story that spins its own fable. Perhaps—but fabulous it isn't.

H. T. Anderson, "Fiction: 'Slave Trade'," in...