Michael Shepard, a detective with his own set of problems, is hired one morning by a fashionable young woman at her Hollywood apartment. Soon he’s embroiled in a murder investigation that may shed light on a nearly forgotten tragedy. A divorced father wondering how to set his son on a better course in life, the detective gets into deepening trouble as he negotiates a vivid panorama of the town’s modern-day beautiful and damned. Author Aram Saroyan harnesses the hardboiled styles of Chandler, Hammett, and Ross MacDonald into a contemporary tale of information age intrigue. The text is supplemented with cell phone photos taken by Saroyan in the same environs in which the story unfolds.
“A writer who looks deeply into himself and his own experience, confronts what he finds there with real courage and reports what he has experienced with a measure of candor that is both breathtaking and, at moments, heartbreaking.”—Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times