His entry begins:I’m currently reading James Ziskin’s Cast the First Stone, his latest in the Ellie Stone mystery series. It’s a gorgeous book. Ziskin eloquently evokes 1960’s Hollywood and the quiet scandals that run like fault lines beneath the surface of the movie town’s glitter. In Ziskin’s novel, grime eclipses glamour masterfully and the result is a beautiful exposé of the underbelly. A budding movie star disappears, a producer is murdered, and the hush-hush of it all is deafening. Crisp dialogue, rich characters, and an expert sense of place together make you smell the sultry rain of a Los Angeles night and the languid mist by the sea, while pulling you into the...[read on]About Desert Remains, from the publisher:
Someone is filling the desert caves around Phoenix with bodies—a madman who, in a taunting ritual, is leaving behind a record of his crimes etched into the stone.Visit Steven Cooper's website.
With no leads and no suspects, Detective Alex Mills sees a case spinning out of control. City leaders want the case solved yesterday, and another detective wants to elbow Mills out of the way. As the body count rises, Mills turns to Gus Parker, an “intuitive medium”whose murky visions sometimes point to real clues. It’s an unorthodox approach, but Mills is desperate.
When Parker is brought to the crime scenes, he sees visions of a house on fire and a screaming child. But what does it mean? He struggles to interpret his psychic messages, knowing that the killer is one step ahead and that in this vast desert, the next murder could happen anywhere. Nor does it help that he’s always been unlucky in love and now finds himself the prey of a lovelorn stalker. She is throwing him off his game.
Someone will win this contest, and both Parker and Mills fear it will be the cunning, ruthless killer, who is able to use the trackless landscape as a cover for his brutal crimes.
My Book, The Movie: Desert Remains.
Writers Read: Steven Cooper.
--Marshal Zeringue
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