During a brutal L.A. heatwave, four people are murdered in the Hollywood Hills and Nikki Easton's best friend Darla Ward has disappeared. The police think she might be one of the victims.
Published: June 25th, 2015
During a brutal L.A. heatwave, four people are murdered in the Hollywood Hills and Nikki Easton's best friend Darla Ward has disappeared. The police think she might be one of the victims.
In her relentless search for the truth, Nikki discovers the hidden side of her friend's life, laying bare secrets buried before Darla was born, and uncovering widening layers of corruption that reach far beyond Hollywood to the highest levels of government.
"I loved this book. The characters, plot and dialogue brought me back to my favorite genre, "Film Noir". [...] The book is full of twists and turns and characters who are not always who they seem to be. It's an exciting ride literally as well as figuratively." Goodreads, Peggy
"[I] got caught up in this story and in following the twists and turns of the multi-layered plot. The ending is surprising (something I never saw coming). After I finished the book, I went back over key turns in the plot and admired the author's skill." - Goodreads, Kathy
CHAPTER 1
EXCERPT
CHAPTER 1
What’s real? Darla used to ask me. How do you know what’s real? I never understood the question. But then I didn’t have platinum hair and cheekbones that could cut glass, and no one ever offered to buy me a Rolls if I spent one night naked in his bed. Darla was a brilliant neon sign flashing pure escape. You almost didn’t notice that those lovely green eyes didn’t blaze like the rest of her. She was both main attraction and sad observer at the carnival. Something had damaged her at a very young age. We never talked much about it, but we recognized this in each other from the start. Isn’t that what friendship is?
The week she disappeared was as extreme as she was. Triple-digit heat in late August and wavy layers of smog suffocating the city. By ten in the morning, it was brutal everywhere, and on the sidewalks in front of the homeless shelter, with the sun bouncing off the film crew trailers and the odor of unwashed bodies and general decay, it was a very special episode of hell. Beneath an archway, a tall man with a filthy blanket draped over his head rolled his eyes heavenward like a biblical prophet. Or a Star Trek castaway waiting to be beamed up.
In one of those trailers, where air conditioning brought the temperature down to the high nineties, I was being stuffed into a fitted leather jacket two sizes too small. Perspiration had already ruined my makeup and the dark circles under my eyes were starting to show through.
Heat keeping you up, hon? the makeup girl had asked. I’d nodded. Half the truth.
Mykel Z, the costume designer, was trying to zip me into the jacket, but his fingers were sweating and frustrating his attempts. “If you’d get yourself boobs, Nikki,” he said, “we wouldn’t have to squeeze you into size zero to work up a little cleavage.”
“Bigger boobs for you, smaller nose for my agent. Average it out and I’m perfect.”
“Almost. Legs from here to eternity, long dark hair to die for. But the nose isa bit roller derby, darling. Did you break it?”
“When I was a kid.”
“I’ll give you the name of a marvelous doctor, a genius with noses. And his lifts for my older ladies . . . I swear the seams don’t even show.”
“I’m not sure I want to wake up one morning and see someone else in the mirror.”
“An idealist. Good luck, honey.”
I was used to this. At my first Hollywood party, a guy asked me what I did. When I told him, he looked bewildered. Then he brightened. “Oh,” he said, “I guess you could play a real person.”
Outside, a prop guy was spraying a couple of shopping carts to dull down their newness, and a wardrobe assistant walked a few extras onto the set.
“No, no, no!” Mykel cried, running out the door, letting in a flush of hot air. “Layers! They need layers!” With a broad motion of his arm, he pointed to some people in the little park on the corner. “Use your eyes! The homeless totallyinvented layering!”
I took advantage of the break, managed to find my phone in the junk shop that is my shoulder bag, and called Darla’s cell again. It flipped straight over to her voice mail. Like it had for three days, since this shoot had begun. No point leaving another message.
Mykel flew back into the trailer and stared at me for a few seconds, blinked like he was fighting back tears, then began to tackle the zipper again. It moved up an inch before it caught on the leather.
He dropped his arms, his lips trembled, then he opened the trailer door again and stuck his head out.
“Benito!” he hollered, with an edge of real panic in his voice. When Benito, his “shlepper,” did not appear, Mykel flopped down on a chair and blotted his face with a tissue.
“Where the hell has he gone?”
“You sent him for a Frappuccino,” I said.
“Ten minutes ago!”
“It’s hard to find a decent barista on Skid Row, Mykel.”
“Maybe that’s why these people look so depressed.”
“You know what,” I said, “let’s forget the jacket for a while. They’re nowhere near ready to shoot. I’m gonna grab some water from the fridge. Want a bottle?”
“Thank you, sweetie.” Mykel placed the jacket back on its hanger with all the tenderness due a garment that cost more than I was being paid for a week’s work.
Beneath my tank top, a trickle of sweat from my bra reminded me I was still padded with chicken cutlets—the
silicone inserts the director wanted for every female in the cast over the age of twelve. When I removed them, I felt almost
human again.
silicone inserts the director wanted for every female in the cast over the age of twelve. When I removed them, I felt almost
human again.
Outside, an assistant was trying to wrangle the extras—a task that had turned chaotic, since real street people kept slipping past security to get to the bagel table. But even from this distance, it was easy to tell them apart. You only had to look at their faces. On some, the flesh itself was infused with misery, the eyes dazed with hopelessness. The rest, in the same soiled layers, were radiant and eager to be noticed.
I’d had a taste of both, but a year on the streets at fifteen had been enough. I got a false ID, found jobs, and managed to take care of myself. But there was something restless in me and I never stayed in one place too long. Somehow, more than a decade slipped by. And what had seemed like freedom began to close in on me.
Then I wound up in L.A. and started picking up rent money working as an extra. A crime show was shooting a Manhattan street scene in downtown Los Angeles, and I got pulled out of the crowd because of my “New York face” for a line they had added: Ain’t seen her in a long time, mistah. That amazing stroke of luck—and the three-thousand dollar initiation fee I was still paying off—got me my union card.
Now I had pictures and an agent and classes, and that was what really hooked me. Acting may be make believe, but in class the truth beneath the face you showed the world was not only welcome but demanded.
Only that wasn’t exactly what working as an actor was like.
This job was a midseason pilot called Street, a “fish out of water” comedy about three girls from Beverly Hills who start a gourmet soup kitchen for the homeless. “Clueless meets Pursuit of Happyness” is how my agent described it. My role—two days’ work that could “go to semi-recurring”—was as a homeless person who gets a makeover.
A wave of hot air blew into the trailer, followed by the production assistant, who looked at me and let out a shriek.
“Mykel!Why isn’t she in costume? They’re ready for her.”
And they were.
Four hours later.
By the time they released me it was past ten, and as the crew struck the lights and equipment, the homeless began crawling into makeshift tents of newspapers and old blankets and cartons, or gathering in doorways, palming small packets that would get them through the night.
Hot stale air still hung over the city as I walked to my car, an ancient MGB that looked right at home in its own version of layers—black over Haight-Ashbury psychedelic over the original British racing green. The standard joke about MGs is that you share custody with your mechanic, but someone had replaced the temperamental English parts with American ones, and it actually started up every time I turned the ignition key.
With the top down, the hot Santa Anas were better than no breeze at all as I passed the rolling lawns and swaying palms of MacArthur Park, moonlight dusting the lake and the silhouetted figures of dealers and users.
A half hour later, I turned onto La Cienega and headed north past the cool stone facades of restaurant row, past Beverly Center whose colored lights bounced off gleaming Mercedes, Lexus SUVs and the occasional virtuous Prius, past the mansard-roofed Sofitel, past the crowds milling outside a few nightspots.
My little cottage still held all the heat of the day. I stripped down to panties, then finished off a pint of Chunky Monkey— ate it straight from the carton in a current of cold air from the open fridge door—and dragged myself into the bedroom.
I used up all the cool spots on the sheet in about five minutes and picked up a mystery from the night table. But no matter how hunky the hero, an old paperback cannot fill the other side of the bed, and I started to think about the man who’d occupied that space until a couple of weeks ago. Dan Ackerman. A good, solid guy, and I left him . . . why? Maybe because he was a good, solid guy.
The only other person in my life who mattered was Darla, and she hadn’t returned my calls, which really wasn’t like her at all. Even when she was on location, she’d phone and talk about anything—what they had for lunch, how filthy the honey wagons got—just to keep from feeling lonely.
I wondered if she was mad at me, if maybe I shouldn’t have been so blunt about her ex-boyfriend Jimmy. It was past midnight and too late to call. But I sent a quick text, then found myself listening in the silence for the phone to chime with her answer.
I turned on the TV. Fourteen dead in the Middle East and four dead in a murder in the Hollywood Hills. But no worries. Just wait for election day. Mike Ryle, TV Land western star/turned senate candidate, was saying, “Let’s return to the America I grew up in.” He sounded so earnest, you could almost forget that he’d grown up in the America of Vietnam and segregation and backstreet abortions.
When the infomercials started, I flicked the TV off and watched the minutes and the hours on the clock change. As the city was waking up, I fell asleep.
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About the author:
Maxine Nunes is a New Yorker who's spent most of her life in Los Angeles.
She has written and produced for television, and currently writes for several publications including the Los Angeles Times.
Her satiric parody of a White House scandal won the Pen USA West International Imitation Hemingway Competition.
Maxine Nunes is a New Yorker who's spent most of her life in Los Angeles.She has written and produced for television, and currently writes for several publications including the Los Angeles Times.
Her satiric parody of a White House scandal won the Pen USA West International Imitation Hemingway Competition.
PURIFIED is a thrilling story that explores many dark subjects, including what it does to those who have to live in the world of killers in order to stop them.
When a mutilated body of an African American girl is found in a park sandbox, the media shows no interest. Instead, their attention is riveted on the disappearance of Olivia Safra, a college student and only child of the powerful and dangerous Richard Safra. Suspended ADA, Beck Oldman, demoted to a rookie PI is assigned her first cases to find a missing teenager and Olivia Safra.
Leads connect the murders to the Safra case. The investigation into her client's private life reveals a dark side in the relationship between a father and daughter and exacts his wrath against Beck. More girls are found murdered, putting Beck in a race to stop a serial killer and stop her own client from destroying her.
PURIFIED is a thrilling story that explores many dark subjects, including what it does to those who have to live in the world of killers in order to stop them.
GUEST POST
Chinatown, Drought, Murder
California is trying to survive its worst drought in recorded history. Northern California residents, I am one, think secession from southern California when water is the topic. Writers and cinephiles think Chinatown. The neo noir film was based on true events. Hollis Mulwray whose murder precipitated many grisly events, the least of which the slitting of Jake Gittes’ nose, was inspired by William Mulholland who was the chief engineer of what was once called The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. He was the engineer who designed and oversaw the Los Angeles Aqueduct which brought water from Owens Valley to LA.
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| A scene taken at the formal opening for the Los Angeles aqueduct in November 1913. (Los Angeles Times) |
Eventually this suck of water dried out the Owens Valley but not without a fight. Check out California Water Wars. See why the word secession creeps into our thoughts. The St. Francis dam was built to store and regulate the water but it broke, resulting in a murderous flood. Six hundred people died. This number is second in terms of the number deaths behind the 1906 earthquake. The dam was considered the worst American civil engineering disaster of the twentieth century. It ruined Mulholland, though he did get a very famous road named after him and two noir movies.
The story of water and Mulholland have all the ingredients for scintillating noir fiction. Greed, desperation, reputation and of course, the all-time reigning champs, money and power. Noir is always the best when it its roots are planted in reality. Real crimes and real people motivated or pushed to the wall. Writers mix up the real with the imagined, create a femme fatale or a female cloaked in intrigue and the intrepid, but stupendously flaw investigator; the reader can’t helped be sucked in, sorry for the water sound. Why? Because of the true element. Whether it be water, money, love, or power, we find our lives intersecting with the story.
Purified, the neo noir novel I wrote has the nonfiction elements of race, gender, and a horrifying tradition practiced on real women worldwide. These themes are interwoven in the whodunit race to stop the killer. As we look up to the sky and dance for rain, it seems like inspiration for writers of murder is in the very dry air.
About the author:
Elizabeth S. Sullivan was born in Chicago and grew up in the LA area. Impassioned by social justice issues, inspired by her parents, she pursued teaching and earned a law degree. She has written five screenplays, one short. Her screenplays have placed or won such as: Nicholl, Austin, Page, and American Zoetrope. These recognitions garnered her a manager, Alexia Melocchi, Little Studio Films. Her first novel, PURIFIED, portrays a strong female protagonist in the genre of a noir thriller. Sullivan explores issues of race, gender, privacy in the cyber age. She has written several blogs on of women in fiction featured on Venture Galleries. She is busy working on the sequel to PURIFIED and a new screenplay.
“When truth is buried underground it grows, it chokes, it gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.” – Émile Zola, J’accuse
“When truth is buried underground it grows, it chokes, it gathers such an explosive force that on the day it bursts out, it blows up everything with it.” – Émile Zola, J’accuse
In this thrilling romantic noir suspense, DEA agent David Alvarez invested four years in deep undercover infiltrating the ruthless Sonora Drug Cartel only to have his primary target gunned down by a rival gang. Now his only hope in salvaging the operation and bringing the largest drug trafficker in the world to justice lies with the man’s beautiful, young widow Catherine, whom he cannot bring himself to trust.
Catherine would do anything to break free from the clutches of the cartel, but despite her desperate efforts, she can never escape the mistakes of her past that continue to haunt her.
Even though he cannot deny their mystical, mutual attraction, David must carry out his orders – from both the DEA and the Cartel – catching Catherine in a spider web of duplicity and deceit. How far will David go to bring down the cartel? If he succeeds in winning the widow’s trust, would he be willing to risk her life – or his heart?
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About the author:
Colette has been writing poems, short stories, and novellas since grade school and experienced early success in having several of her poems published in her junior high school newspaper. Her interest in literature led her to marry her college English professor, but eventually a love of history encouraged her to trade up to a British historian.Technical writing has dominated Colette’s career for the past twenty years; but finding little room for creativity in that genre, she dedicated fifteen months traveling to Europe and Britain, researching Regency England and vampire lore and literature, to complete her first full-length novel, Pulse and Prejudice (Austenprose Readers’ Choice: Top 5 Books of 2012) - the bestselling paranormal adaptation of the Jane Austen classic, which tells the story of Mr. Darcy, Vampire. Pulse and Prejudice was also selected the 2013 1st Place Winner in Category: Chatelaine Awards Romantic Fiction.
Colette was named “Debut Author of 2012″ by Austenprose and selected a 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Semi-finalist for her novel The Proud and the Prejudiced (abriged as All My Tomorrows), which was also selected the 2013 “Favorite Modern Adaptation” by Austenesque Reviews and voted a “Top Ten Romance Novel of 2012″ (P&E Reader’s Poll).
Colette’s latest release, the romantic thriller Alicia’s Possession, was the publisher’s #1 Bestselling Romantic Suspense for 4 straight weeks following its debut in June of 2013 and then again in January, 2014, after being voted a “Top Ten Romance Novel of 2013″ (P&E Reader’s Poll).
Her next release is the romantic noir thriller, The Widow, and she is currently researching and writing a sequel to Pulse and Prejudice entitled Dearest Bloodiest Elizabeth, which follows the newlywed Vampire Darcy and his bride Elizabeth from Britain to Antebellum New Orleans.
Colette lives in South Louisiana with her historian husband and their two dogs.
Contact Colette Saucier by email: colette@colettesaucier.com
author's books
Francesco, a brilliant middle-aged oncologist signs in a social network while surfing the Internet. He bumps into the profile of the girl he was desperately in love with during High School ‘68, when a horrible homicide happened and the guilty was never to be found. 
Published: June 27th, 2015
Francesco, a brilliant middle-aged oncologist signs in a social network while surfing the Internet. He bumps into the profile of the girl he was desperately in love with during High School ‘68, when a horrible homicide happened and the guilty was never to be found. His destiny intertwines in an unpredictable way with that of the girl, now a mature woman. Desperate passions and deep loves of a generation belonging to the past. A thriller that leads to a stunning end.
"This was a wonderful collaboration with you and thank you for letting me help you achieve your goal of publishing the English edition of this unique story. Set in the context of the turbulent times we grew up in and then forward to present day, those of us who remember how it was then and the different paths we took to where are now can relate to the complexities of choices and decisions your characters faced in those difficult years." Allison Whitmore
I used a particular literary technique writing the book, that is speaking in the first person. So the reader looks through Francesco’s eyes and thinks with his mind. And another thing that surprised me is that I thought and described even intimate moments as if I were a man. I enjoyed it so much to enter in a man’s shoes that when the book was ended I really felt I had lost something. The publisher thought that there was a mistake on my name as an author, because only a man could have written so well about man!
"As I wrote No Steps on the Snow with my left hand, when an accident occurred to me and I was motionless for a couple of months, Italian literary critics use to say that this book was written with the left hand, the hand of the heart."
I was born in Rome, where I lived during my childhood. Then I moved to United States of America where I lived a significant period of my adolescence, attending St. Francis School in Manchester, New Hampshire. Then I came back to Italy, Rome, where I finished my classical studies. Even in the professional life I have lived experiences in different contexts, which have enriched my "baggage". Working in the public sector I have dealt, inter alia, with the International Relations and Cultural Exchanges with Foreign Countries. In the private life, I'm married with two children. I was always inclined towards writing and this passion has led me to take part in various literary competitions, winning many important national awards. I wrote the following books:
RACHEL’S CHILD (Italian Edition) My second thriller published in 2012 and presented successfully at the Lamezia Terme Book Fair.
GUEST POST
When did I become a writer?
The answer is that I’ve always been an author, without realizing it. But a woman’s life is full of things and I am a mother of two children, with a family and a work and I couldn’t dedicate time to my passion. Until an accident occurred to me and, motionless for two months, I could finally write. I knew what an inspiration is, hearing in my mind the first words of my book. I started to put it down, not knowing what the story would have been and, without an outline, I went on writing. That’s how No Steps on the Snow came out, intertwining memories of High School time, dreams of that generation and imagination. The main character of the story, Francesco, is a middle-aged oncologist that, surfing in the Internet and signing in a social network, stumbles in the profile of the girl, now a mature woman, he loved desperately during High School time, in 1968. Those were the years of the students’ rebellion, of Woodstock and the free love, the time of desperate passions. What comes out, page by page, is that Francesco feels a great remorse toward Milena. But that’s not all, in fact through Francesco’s memories the reader discovers that a terrible homicide had happened at that time. The guilty was never to be found and the murder had been registered as a political crime, one of the many that occurred in those years. Francesco’s actual high bourgeois life, comfortable and safe with four children and a wife, that he occasionally betrays, gets completely upset. The inner journey that starts in his mind, full of memories and nostalgia, leads him to get in touch with Milena. From then on, the suspense grows line after line to a stunning end.
I used a particular literary technique writing the book, that is speaking in the first person. So the reader looks through Francesco’s eyes and thinks with his mind. And another thing that surprised me is that I thought and described even intimate moments as if I were a man. I enjoyed it so much to enter in a man’s shoes that when the book was ended I really felt I had lost something. The publisher thought that there was a mistake on my name as an author, because only a man could have written so well about man! In the book, I describe some beautiful Italian places. First of all Rome, with its mystique and charm, as it was then and now, as well as Santa Severa with its ancient castle on the sea or Monte Argentario, a mountain in the sea, bound to the land by a narrow street. And I remind many songs of the ‘60s, like Don’t Let Me Down and Get Back by the Beatles, If Paradise Is Half As Nice, by the Amen Corner and Eleonor, by the Turtles, that became great successes also in Italian editions. A soundtrack that takes the reader through the whole story.
One of the best memories about this book, besides the great satisfaction of the national awards I won in its Italian edition, was a meeting I had with my readers. A middle-aged woman came near me and asked me if she could read to me a sentence of my book that had particularly touched her. And she pronounced intensely these few lines of No Steps on the Snow “…the doors left locked inside our soul can open again when they want to, even if we delude ourselves into thinking we have thrown away the key.” I felt moved and we looked at each other’s eyes wet of emotion.
About the author:
I was born in Rome, where I lived during my childhood. Then I moved to United States of America where I lived a significant period of my adolescence, attending St. Francis School in Manchester, New Hampshire. Then I came back to Italy, Rome, where I finished my classical studies. Even in the professional life I have lived experiences in different contexts, which have enriched my "baggage". Working in the public sector I have dealt, inter alia, with the International Relations and Cultural Exchanges with Foreign Countries. In the private life, I'm married with two children. I was always inclined towards writing and this passion has led me to take part in various literary competitions, winning many important national awards. I wrote the following books: NO STEPS ON THE SNOW (English Edition published in June 2015)The Italian edition was published in 2010 and the book has been a cultural event for the city of Rome in summer 2012. It won the National Literary Award Circe 2013. It has been presented in the most important Italian Book Fair Piùlibripiùliberi.
A SHADOW ON MERRIMACK RIVER My first English Edition published in 2013 available in USA and worldwide, has had four/five stars review from American literary blogs and readers. It's Italian Version “UN’OMBRA SUL FIUME MERRIMACK” is an Amazon Bestselling in the genders of historical fiction and thrillers and noir.
RACHEL’S CHILD (Italian Edition) My second thriller published in 2012 and presented successfully at the Lamezia Terme Book Fair.THE FOUNTAIN OF THE FROGS (Italian Edition) It was published in June 2015. The thriller is set in the ancient and magic centre of Rome. It won the National Literary Award Perseide 2014.
DEWDROPS SHORT NOVELS (Italian Edition) is a collection of my short novels, that investigate the intimate sphere of human feelings, and have won national literary awards.
My Italian editions will soon be translated in English. To a journalist who asked me what is writing for me, I answered: “Writing is my haven, my everything.”
National Literary Award Circe 2013 Winner
