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BOOKS FROM EDWARD WRIGHT
CLEA'S MOON
Winner of the Debut Dagger Award
April 2003
ISBN: 0399150471
Once he was Sierra Lane, hero to countless youngsters in a series of B-movie westerns.
Now, after a spell in prison, John Ray Horn lives on the margins of 1940s Los Angeles. Blacklisted by the studios and divorced by his wife, he earns a shaky living by collecting gambling debts for his old Indian co-star, Joseph Mad Crow.
One night Scotty Bullard, an old friend, contacts Horn soon after the death of his own father, a powerful real estate developer. Among the elder Bullard's possessions Scotty has found a collection of obscene photographs of underage girls, one of whom he thinks is Clea, Horn's stepdaughter before his divorce.
Within two days, Scotty has met a violent death. And soon afterward, Horn's ex-wife tells him that Clea, who is now sixteen, has run away. Horn feels instinctively that Scotty was murdered by someone who wants to keep the photos secret, and that Clea's disappearance was somehow triggered by the emergence of the pictures. He is driven to find the killer of his old friend, but his most urgent need is to find Clea, the one bright memory from his failed marriage.
Horn's search takes him from neon-lit piers to wooded canyons, from estates in the Hollywood Hills to the clubs on Central Avenue, the Harlem of L.A. He doubts that he was ever the hero he once portrayed, but he knows that he must come to believe in himself if he is to save Clea.
WHILE I DISAPPEAR
Winner of the Shamus Award and the
Southern California Booksellers Association Award
May 2004
ISBN: 0399151982
UK title: The Silver Face
One rain-soaked evening, Horn runs into an old flame. Rose Galen played the female lead in his second movie. Young, beautiful and improbably talented for her B-movie surroundings, she had a shining quality to her. Now, years later, Rose is a shattered creature, drink-sodden and heavy with sadness. Something happened to her years ago, before Horn first knew her, something so terrible that it would eventually leave her broken. Hoping to uncover her long-held secret, Horn goes to visit Rose at her shabby rooming house. He finds her strangled to death. 
Aware of a debt to her that
he never fully acknowledged, he sets out to find her killer, aided by Joseph Mad Crow, Horn's onetime Indian co-star who is now his employer. He encounters figures from Rose's past--the lawyer with a bootlegging background and a lethal bodyguard; the lusty, larger-than-life actress with a capacity for settling scores; and the ex-Shakespearean actor with a faded career and a crumbling mansion.
To unmask Rose's killer, Horn must first determine what happened to her so long ago. His search takes him back into the Hollywood of the 1920s, the era of the silent film, and a wild party attended by both movie celebrities and racketeers. On that night, a terrible act left a young woman dead and several people guarding a secret that would only begin to unravel after Rose Galen took her last tortured breath.
RED SKY LAMENT
Winner of the CWA Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award
March 2006
ISBN: 0752869299
Los Angeles, late 1940s: As brush fires begin to eat at the dry grass in the hills rimming the San Fernando Valley, a more ominous threat is taking shape. All over Hollywood, the U.S. government is ordering people to appear before the House Un-American Activities Committee as part of the crusade to uncover Communist influence in the movies.
Horn has little use for politics, but he knows a few things about outsiders. And when his ex-lover Maggie O'Dare asks him to come to the aid of an old friend of hers who has been targeted by the committee, he can't refuse. Owen Bruder, a brilliantly talented but notoriously difficult screenwriter, is accused of having belonged to the Communist Party -- a charge he strongly denies. If Horn can discover Bruder's secret accuser, they might have a chance to clear his name. But no one is willing to talk. People are scared -- perhaps more frightened than they were in the Depression, or even the war. Hollywood has become a place run by fear and suspicion, where a whisper is all it takes to smear an innocent man.
As Horn's search leads him to powerful figures in Hollywood, the media, and his own government, his investigation takes a sudden and deadly turn. He is forced to ask if those in authority are capable of murder in order to attain their political goals. And he finds that more people will die before all the secrets are laid bare.
Now there's no mistaking the smell of fire in the air. It is just over the mountains, still unseen, but it's coming this way…
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DAMNATION FALLS
UK Release, Orion Books
ISBN-10: 0752885804
ISBN-13: 978-0752885803
September 2007
US Release, St. Martin's Minotaur
August 2008
ISBN-10: 0312380011
ISBN-13: 978-0312380014
Randall Wilkes, his big-city journalism career in ruins, has returned after twenty years to Pilgrim's Rest, the Tennessee hill town where he grew up. He has taken on a lucrative but low-prestige writing job for Sonny McMahan, a former governor and Randall's boyhood friend, whose own career is under a shadow and who needs a ghost-written autobiography to ease his way back into politics. Faye McMahan, Sonny's mother, is addled with age, imagining that her dead husband is alive and worrying that her son might be in danger. Amid a violent autumn storm, Randall finds Faye hideously murdered, hanged by the neck from a bridge over the town landmark called Damnation Falls. Within days, another person connected to the McMahan clan is murdered in an even more grisly fashion. And the bones of a third, long-buried murder victim -- a young woman -- have emerged from the earth. Randall's ties to the victims force him to acknowledge debts that go back decades. Drawing on his investigative skills and his roots in the region, he sets out to discover who is behind the killings. His search takes him the length of the state - a land once split by civil war, where history lies close to the surface and tales of murder and betrayal weigh heavily on the town of Pilgrim's Rest. Before all the answers are in, more people will die, an old score will be settled, and the dead will finally tell their stories.
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