Light Before Day » (Reprint)

Christopher Rice is the author of the New York Times bestsellers A Density of Souls and The Snow Garden. The son of author Anne Rice and the late poet Stan Rice, he lives in Los Angeles.

In West Hollywood, journalist Adam Murphy is abruptly fired while chasing a career-making story. A Marine pilot is killed when his helicopter spirals into the Pacific Ocean — and Adam suspects the death was not accidental. Battling his own demons in a city of temptations, Adam pursues the truth alongside his new boss, a famous curmudgeonly mystery writer, and discovers more than he planned about his recently estranged lover, a string of murders of other young men — and a conspiracy so extraordinary that it threatens his sanity and his life. With a talent for creating suspense-tinged fiction that is "chillingly perverse" (USA Today) and "vivid and intense" (The Boston Globe), Christopher Rice delivers a dark thriller of revenge and sexual obsession.

Publishers Weekly

A 20-something magazine reporter becomes embroiled in a Hollywood murder mystery in Rice's (The Snow Garden) third, richly developed thriller. It's a blessing in disguise when Adam Murphy is fired from racy fluff rag Glitz, since he'd been chasing a real story involving a closeted Marine helicopter pilot, Daniel Brady, whose association with a pedophilic pimp produced a sordid videotape that led to Daniel's suicide plane crash. But Adam's still reeling from the demise of a heated, three-week affair with hunky but secretive Corey, who'd outgrown Adam's blackout-inducing drunkenness. Adam soon becomes the assistant to sharp, sarcastic straight mystery novelist James Wilton, who instructs Adam to continue researching Daniel Brady. One of Rice's most spirited characters, James consistently counteracts Adam's hyperactive enthusiasm with candor and a sensible "working theory," and when Corey disappears, Adam discovers that three other gay men have inexplicably vanished over the past few years, supposed victims of the West Hollywood Slasher. Armed with a dossier from a trustworthy Hollywood reporter, Adam sets out to solve the crime that swells into blackmail, murder, a child porn ring and a subplot involving a "rogue assassin" who blows up methamphetamine labs. Though this is a step up from the author's previous efforts, Rice has yet to leave behind the sometimes awkward prose and dialogue (which veers between frivolous and woodenly expository) that dampens the narrative tension he cultivates. Agent, Lynn Nesbit. 12-city author tour. (Mar. 16) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.