Bungalow Heaven

Talk about a killer movie...



The story begins on a sweltering, wind-swept night in a Los Angeles suburb. The owner of a rundown old theater is shot dead behind the snack bar, an assassination disguised to look like a holdup gone wrong. And the story begins eighty years earlier, MGM Studios, 1924, when a mad genius of a director creates a masterpiece, only to have it taken from him by the studio brass and, presumably, destroyed.



How are they connected -- this "lost legend" of the Silent Film era, and this seemingly random act of violence at a crumbling movie house eight decades later? That is the question that keeps readers devouring the pages of Bungalow Heaven, a gripping, unpredictable, and surprisingly funny crime novel based in part on a true story. Warner escorts the reader from the barrios of East L.A. to the back lots and boardrooms of a Hollywood Studio to the oak-lined streets of "Bungalow Heaven," the quiet neighborhood where all secrets are ultimately revealed. Along the way, we dig deep into the lives of a memorable cast of characters:


•Cam Healy, the onetime Hollywood hot shot, now on the skids, with a penchant for soft-rock oldies, prescription meds, and murder;
•Hernan Escudero, the former gang member looking to move up to a more sophisticated class of crime;
•Lita Ritenour, the single mother and lead homicide detective, faced with a mystifying string of murders, who may have even more to lose than the suspects themselves;
•along with a vivid supporting cast of criminals and cops, kooks and cranks, and celebrity wannabes, has-beens, and hangers-on.



Wildly original and impossible to put down, Bungalow Heaven is a tale of crime and its consequences that slices through the glamorous façade of Tinsel Town to reveal the savage ambition beating in the dark heart of the Hollywood Dream.