Most of my writing career has been spent in tv and theatre. I spent a decade in L.A. writing sitcoms ("Suddenly Susan" and "The Chris Isaak Show," among others.) My plays have been staged around the country, at theatres such as The Mark Taper Forum in L.A, and Playwrights Horizons in New York. My new screenplay, "Steve" recently won "Best Comedy Feature Script" in the Nashville Film Festival’s Screenwriting Competition.
Lazarus is my first novel, but it started out as a tv pilot. The idea for it came to me in an image: a teen girl surrounded by the bleak, harvested cornfields of her prairie hometown, grimly intent on solving a murder. I knew that the girl had better detective instincts than all the adults around her, including her police chief father. I knew that she had a profoundly deep relationship with her charmingly wise-ass boyfriend. And I knew that he had died, but that that was a minor impediment to a love as limitless as theirs.
And so was born the story of Margo and Hank, teen detectives in godforsaken Lazarus, Nebraska, a speck on the map made all the more desolate by it’s sharply ascending murder rate. The cornerstone of which is the mysterious demise of Margo’s own beloved mother JoAnn some seven years hence. The dark puzzle surrounding her death has been a tremendous weight on both Margo and her father. Maybe this is why Margo never smiles (tho Hank does his best), and why she’s so fiercely determined to find the truth.
Early in the book, when another murder hits close to home and leaves her father incapacitated, Margo takes on the case. But she doesn’t do it alone; Hank has managed, through the power of their love, to stay with Margo in a kind of limbo, unheard or seen by anyone else. Margo and Hank’s casework is neatly divided: as a mortal, Margo will do the every day gumshoe work, whereas Hank can spy on suspects unseen and learn their secrets (and God knows secrets abound; in this Prairie Gothic milieu, almost everyone seems suspicious.) Hank has the ability to interview the departed, who hang out at a kind of way station for the dead, an abandoned former movie palace on the outskirts of town.
As Margo’s quest becomes more perilous, Hank will try to protect her, but -- as a ghost -- his bodyguarding powers are limited. Down the rabbit hole he follows her, helplessly sidelined as Margo finally battles the sinister forces that killed her mother.
"Lazarus" is a finished, self-contained novel, but may also be the first of a trilogy.