Red Sky Lament

by Edward Wright

Overview

John Ray Horn, blacklisted B-movie hero and ex-con turned debt collector, reluctantly takes on a job to help out Owen Bruder, a former writer on his way to prison for his suspected communist sympathies, until a violent death makes matters worse.  This powerful noir thriller evokes all the decadence and superficial glamour of late 1940s Hollywood.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780752869292
Publisher:	Orion Publishing Group, Limited
Publication date:	01/28/2006
Series:	A John Ray Horn Thriller
Edition description:	1ST
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Edward Wright is the winner of the CWA Debut Dagger Award and the Shamus Award for Best PI Novel of the Year and is a former editor at the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. He lives in Los Angeles.

Editorial Reviews

"The kind of art that stirs up old memories and pierces the soul...His best and most important political and social statement...All of Wright’s books do what the best fiction does: re–create a vanished world… then populate it with people we’ know anywhere."

Chicago Tribune

A must for noir fans with a sense of irony.

Booklist

A controversial screenwriter on the verge of being blacklisted gets bumped off. As Hollywood rings down the curtain on the 1940s, gossip-monger Laura Lee Paisley is giving rivals Hedda and Louella a run for their money by "exposing" Communist Party members all over Tinseltown. John Ray Horn, former cowboy star, ex-con and sometime shamus (While I Disappear, 2004, etc.), is asked by his onetime lover Maggie O'Dare, queen of the action serials, to find out who's fingered maverick screenwriter Owen Bruder as a Red sympathizer. Horn is reluctant to help the brilliant but abrasive Bruder (read Clifford Odets). But when he learns that Maggie is Bruder's daughter, he acquiesces. As Bruder steels himself to testify before a Congressional committee that's clearly out for blood, Horn tries unsuccessfully to rattle Laura Lee Paisley and takes the measure of the committee's ambitious chair, J. Parnell Thomas, before visiting the Bruders a second time to gather more information. On the way back to his car from consulting Bruder's highly supportive wife Lillian, he finds Bruder facedown in his swimming pool. In digging up dirt on a handful of Bruder's colleagues and fending off the brutal thugs hired by Mitchell Cross, Thomas's chief investigator, Horn gets help from his best friend, Joseph Mad Crow, and Mad Crow's open-ended houseguest, populist troubadour Woodrow Wilson "Woody" Guthrie. An engrossing novel of Hollywood's blacklist, packed with period trivia, and a passable mystery.

Kirkus Reviews

"What all of Wright's books do is what the best fiction does: recreate a vanished world, then populate it with people we'd know anywhere."  —Chicago Tribune

From the Publisher