The Dead Circus

From the acclaimed author of Stars Screaming, "a fine new novel . . . [that] pulls some of the dregs of Manson's dark legacy into the light" ( The Oregonian). It's 1986. Devastated by the death of his fiancée, private eye Gene Burk becomes obsessed with an unsolved mystery from his days with the LAPD: the death of up-and-coming rockabilly star Bobby Fuller. While attempting to reconstruct the circumstances that led to Fuller's demise, Gene is unexpectedly contacted by a woman from his fiancée's hometown, a survivor of the Manson Family who needs his help to escape her past. As Gene travels back in history to the moment Manson partied alongside Bobby Fuller and the Beach Boys, he lays bare Los Angeles in the sixties, its relative innocence and its seedy underbelly, and uncovers how those currents have shaped not just history but his own life and those of the people he loves. "Masterfully creating and sustaining a palpable, pure, elegiac paean to lost hopes and dreams, Kaye seems to suggest that the human impulse toward yearning and hopefulness can exist unmarred by and side by side with rampant corruption and pure evil" ( Booklist, starred review). "A looming thundercloud of a book; it begins in a Southern California that seems permanently infused with sunshine and ends in one that has been forever submerged beneath the dark surf of a noirish nightmare." -- The New York Times Book Review "A great baggy monster of a book, shifting shape, made up of tales of murder, desertion and love, as full of life as the city it describes." -- The Washington Post