While I Disappear

Read While I Disappear Storyline:

One rain-soaked evening, John Ray Horn runs into an old flame.

Rose Galen played the female lead in his second movie. Young, beautiful and improbably talented for her B-movie surroundings, she had a shining quality to her. Now, years later, Rose is a shattered creature, drink-sodden and heavy with sadness. Something happened to her years ago, before Horn first knew her, something so terrible that it would eventually leave her broken. Hoping to uncover her long-held secret, Horn goes to visit Rose at her shabby rooming house and finds her strangled to death.

Aware of a debt to her that he never fully acknowledged, he sets out to find her killer, aided by Joseph Mad Crow, Horn's onetime Indian co-star who is now his employer. To unmask Rose's killer, Horn must first determine what happened to her so long ago.

His search takes him back into the Hollywood of the 1920s-the era of the silent film-and a wild party attended by both movie celebrities and racketeers. He soon encounters figures from Rose's past--the lawyer with a bootlegging background and a lethal bodyguard; the lusty, larger-than-life actress with a capacity for settling scores and the ex-Shakespearean actor with a faded career and a crumbling mansion. Before long, Horn discovers a terrible act that left a young woman dead and several people guarding a secret that would only begin to unravel after Rose Galen took her last tortured breath.

WHILE I DISAPPEAR is the winner of the 2004 Shamus Award and the 2004 Southern California Booksellers Association Award.