Classic Mysteries coming out in the Fall of 2008

Edgar Award winner Simple Justice (August 2008)

When a prettyboy cokehead is murdered outside a gay bar in a working class district of Los Angeles, and a young Latino quickly confesses to the crime, it appears the case is closed. Benjamin Justice, a disgraced former reporter with the Los Angeles Times, is lured out of his alcoholic seclusion to look more deeply into the murder. But why would a teenager confess to a brutal gang initiation killing he didn’t commit? Only Benjamin Justice understands, but with his credibility shattered, no one’s listening. As Justice threads his way through a colorful gallery of suspects, he’s thrust back into the world of gay bars and haunting memories that he’s tried to put behind him since the death of his lover from AIDS six years earlier, an event that precipitated the Pulitzer scandal that destroyed his promising career. With Justice teetering on an emotional brink, his reluctant new partner, Los Angeles Sun reporter Alexandra Templeton, must solve the riddle of Justice’s own dark past to save him. Together, with her deadline looming, they confront the real killer, using every bit of journalistic skill they can muster to pin that person to the crime.  Reprint.

 “With its vivid dissection of Los Angeles low life and intriguing characters, you may find it tough to put down…” —People magazine (“Beach Book of the Week”) 

“Suspenseful and moving…sexy too…” —The Washington Post 

“This finally crafted first novel is a knockout…this page-turner is superb.” —Frontiers, Los Angeles

  

Revision of Justice (September 2008)

When reporter Alexandra Templeton drags Benjamin Justice to a party thrown by a legendary Hollywood screenwriting instructor, they stumble into the murder of Reza Jafari, a young, wannabe screenwriter with more enemies that completed scripts. The prime suspect is the victim’s roommate, Danny Romero, a young man who will die of AIDS in jail, unless Justice can solve the mystery first, and allow Danny the dignified death he desperately wants. Among the other suspects: a macho Australian action director, with his own dark secrets and a career in decline; a former starlet, now the voluptuous widow of a recently deceased studio executive, who has a good reason to want the victim dead; a high-powered female agent, as button-downed and driven as she is deceptive; a Persian restaurant owner, the victim’s devoutly Muslim father, who has a troubling violent streak; and an up-and-coming lesbian film producer, as tough as she is smart. His search for clues takes Justice into musty Hollywood film archives, and between the lines of several screenplays, while putting his own life in grave danger. After the murder of an elderly screenwriter who used Reza Jafari as a younger "front" to pitch his scripts, the murder plot shifts into high gear, propelling Justice and Templeton into a raging fire that consumes the Hollywood Hills, burning steadily toward the famous Hollywood Sign—and the identity of a cold-blooded killer. Reprint.

“…a stark, absorbing, and seemingly authentic tour of the Hollywood fringes…”—Publishers Weekly 

“This is a terrific novel, with a tight plot and good characters.”—Toronto Globe & Mail 

 

Lambda Literary Award winner Justice at Risk (October 2008)

Reporter Alexandra Templeton sets up the reclusive Justice on a blind date that leads to a rare opportunity of legitimate work -- writing and producing a segment on bareback (unprotected) sex for a PBS documentary on AIDS. When a producer on the series is found murdered in a tawdry motel room, Justice resists becoming involved in another murder investigation that might jeopardize his new career opportunity. But Justice is smitten with gorgeous Peter Graff, his assistant on the show, who was close to the victim, and Justice is drawn in against his better instincts. As he delves deeper into the murder, he finds that it may be connected to a 15-year-old incident of police brutality that was never prosecuted, but may have been caught on tape by a TV camera crew on a police ride-along. With that missing piece of videotape as the catalyst, his investigation reaches the highest levels of the city’s wealthy power structure and unpeels layer after layer of the city’s dark history. Ignoring danger signals, Justice takes reckless chances that put him at mortal risk, and that change his life forever. The story reaches a shocking climax in the dungeon-like basement of a former LAPD cop, where pleasure is mixed with pain—and the fates of Justice and the beautiful innocent, Peter Graff, are in the hands of a human monster.  Reprint.

“A startlingly complex and refreshingly sophisticated mystery, Wilson’s third book tackles real-life issues with just the right combination of urbanity and hard-boiled sleuthing.”—Publisher’s Weekly (starred review)

 

Lambda Literary Award winner The Limits of Justice (December 2008)

When celebrity biographer Randall Capri writes a lurid and unauthorized bio of the late Rod Preston, a virile movie star of the fifties and sixties, it sets in motion a deadly chain of events. Preston’s naive daughter, Charlotte, hires Benjamin Justice to turn the tables on Capri by ghost writing an expose of him, while salvaging her father’s good name. After finding Charlotte dead, an apparent suicide, Justice begins to have his doubts about how she died. Working with reporter Alexandra Templeton, his investigation takes him from the wealthy hillside enclaves of Montecito to the gay bars of Tijuana as he searches for the truth—and a young witness named Chucho Pernales, who has fled back to Mexico in fear for his life. Along the way, Justice stumbles into a ring of wealthy Hollywood pedophiles, who use young boys as dispensable toys—a group of men connected to the late Rod Preston, and possibly to Charlotte Preston’s death. When Randall Capri is also murdered, Justice himself becomes a suspect. While he copes with a life-threatening health crisis, becoming desperately weak, his search for the killer propels him behind the locked gates of a mysterious compound in the remote California desert—and to evidence of evil so chilling, it makes his blood run cold.  Reprint.

“The Limits of Justice is Wilson’s fourth installment in the award-winning Justice series. It’s also a winner for Wilson fans and readers looking for a detective series as addictive as Sue Grafton’s, James Lee Burke’s or Patricia Cornwell’s.”—USA Today 

“…a compelling portrait of gay life in contemporary Los Angeles in his fourth book…featuring HIV-positive journalist Benjamin Justice.”—Publishers Weekly