The Dead Circus
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the acclaimed author of Stars Screaming, "a fine new novel . . . [that] pulls some of the dregs of Manson's dark legacy into the light" (The Oregonian).
It's 1986. Devastated by the death of his fiancée, private eye Gene Burk becomes obsessed with an unsolved mystery from his days with the LAPD: the death of up-and-coming rockabilly star Bobby Fuller. While attempting to reconstruct the circumstances that led to Fuller's demise, Gene is unexpectedly contacted by a woman from his fiancée's hometown, a survivor of the Manson Family who needs his help to escape her past.
As Gene travels back in history to the moment Manson partied alongside Bobby Fuller and the Beach Boys, he lays bare Los Angeles in the sixties, its relative innocence and its seedy underbelly, and uncovers how those currents have shaped not just history but his own life and those of the people he loves. "Masterfully creating and sustaining a palpable, pure, elegiac paean to lost hopes and dreams, Kaye seems to suggest that the human impulse toward yearning and hopefulness can exist unmarred by and side by side with rampant corruption and pure evil" (Booklist, starred review).
"A looming thundercloud of a book; it begins in a Southern California that seems permanently infused with sunshine and ends in one that has been forever submerged beneath the dark surf of a noirish nightmare." —The New York Times Book Review
"A great baggy monster of a book, shifting shape, made up of tales of murder, desertion and love, as full of life as the city it describes." —The Washington Post
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A seemingly ordinary tragedy plunges an ex-cop-turned-detective into the murky, bizarre world of the Manson family in screenwriter and film director Kaye's second novel, an overplotted but riveting noir thriller set mostly in 1960s and '70s Los Angeles. The action begins in 1986, when former LAPD cop Gene Burk (brother of Ray Burk, the central figure in Kaye's debut, Stars Screaming) is shattered by the death of his fianc e, a flight attendant named Alice Hanson, in an airline crash. When Burk inherits her effects, he discovers some letters that link her to a fictional woman from the Manson cult named Alice McMillan. Burk is able to connect McMillan's comings and goings to the death of '60s rockabilly star Bobby Fuller, whose mysterious demise possibly ordered by Frank Sinatra when the star dated Sinatra's daughter is an obsession of Burk's. Kaye populates his novel with enough suspects and shady Hollywood characters to fill two murder mysteries, but the story remains reasonably tight despite the abundance of characters and the presence of several tangential subplots. Kaye does a nice job with scenes of real-life entertainers, and the lurid details of Manson's decadent lifestyle add narrative momentum. While the climax doesn't quite justify the buildup, there are some chilling final sequences. Kaye could stand to rein in his tendency for busy plotting, but this book packs a major wallop nonetheless.
