Santa Barbara Malice

For years the author believed that ‘Santa Barbara Malice’ was lost in a computer crash. He was delighted to discover, during a recent cleaning, a disk of the novel resting safely in a seldom-visited corner of his home office! Though written before the author had conceived of the Kerrigan/Seagrove series, this book now serves as a natural prequel to those five novels, since its mystery unfolds at the American Film Manufacturing Studio in Santa Barbara in 1912-13, just before the Kerrigan twins move to Hollywood to work for Universal Pictures (as chronicled in ‘Shooting in Universal City, ’ the first Kerrigan/Seagrove adventure). Flying A suffers a flurry of mysterious attacks on its movie sets, some of which appear to be aimed at Warren Kerrigan, at this time the most popular movie actor in America. Although Warren is apparently gay, he has become involved with a young heiress from Cleveland. It falls to American’s busy production manager, Wallace Kerrigan, to interrupt his courtship of Nina Mae Richdale to solve these malicious crimes with the assistance of director Allan Dwan and cowboy artist Edward Borein. Rumors of an embarrassing photograph begin to circulate. Before long a murder is committed. Kerrigan and Borein ride into the deserted canyons east of Santa Barbara in search of the killer.