"Murder Season"

Robert Ellis is a former filmmaker and political media consultant from Los Angeles. His bestselling crime novels include Access to Power, The Dead Room, City of Fire, and The Lost Witness.

Ellis applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Murder Season, and reported the following:

Murder Season is my personal favorite of the three Lena Gamble novels. It’s a bigger than life Hollywood murder mystery, dark and twisted, very fast and very spooky. The tip of the iceberg is exposed quickly. There’s been a double murder at Club 3 AM, a private nightclub that caters to the Hollywood A-list. The media is feeding on rumors and swarming the police line at the club. LAPD brass and the DA’s office have their stingers out. And unfortunately for homicide detective Lena Gamble, she’s just been assigned a case so hush-hush no one would give her even a single detail over the phone.

The first victim is the powerful Johnny Bosco, owner of Club 3 AM and keeper of Hollywood’s greatest secrets. But it’s the second murder victim who’s way too hot to handle. 25-year-old Jacob Gant, acquitted just weeks ago in L.A.’s latest trial-of-the-century for murdering his 16-year-old neighbor, the beautiful and innocent Lily Hight.

The obvious suspect for the double murder is Lily’s father, Tim Hight, a strange, edgy man who has more than one monkey on his back and refuses to talk. On page 69 Lena is just finishing a search for the murder weapon in his home office when she realizes that Hight is a former film director who would have been familiar with the gunshot wounds to Jacob Gant’s head.

Lena had seen the same wounds in a John Ford western called The Searchers, and remembered it as she examined Gant’s corpse at the crime scene. It was the fact that the killer had shot out Jacob Gant’s eyes just the way it happened in the movie. It was the fact that the Comanches believed that without eyes a victim couldn’t enter the spirit world. Without eyes, Jacob Gant would be forced to wander between the winds forever...

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg in Murder Season. The twists and turns and roller coaster ride are yet to come.

Learn more about the book and author at Robert Ellis's website and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: City of Fire.

The Page 69 Test: The Lost Witness.

--Marshal Zeringue