Roy Milano Mysteries Books In Order
- The Cutting Room (2004)
- The Shooting Script (2005)
Wasteland Books In Order
- Wasteland (2013)
- Wanderers (2014)
- Guardians (2015)
Novels
- Mrs. White (1987)
Collections
- Sleeping Beauty / Smoke (1985)
- The Show Must Go On, Seeing Someone, If Walls Could Talk. (1998)
- The Family Unit (2014)
Plays
- Freud’s House (1997)
- Bed and Sofa (1998)
- Gorgo’s Mother (1998)
- The Magic Act (1998)
- Uncle Lumpy Comes to Visit (1998)
- Embarassments (2006)
Graphic Novels
- City of Spies (2010)
- Brain Camp (2010)
Roy Milano Mysteries Book Covers
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Laurence Klavan Books Overview
The Cutting Room
Like the hero in a classic Hitchcock thriller, the innocent movie buff at the center of this witty and suspenseful novel finds his ordinary life suddenly transformed when he’s plunged into a harrowing game of intrigue, duplicity, and danger. Spurred into a frantic race from New York to Hollywood to Barcelona and back, he ll encounter enough hairpin twists, shocking surprises, white knuckle tension, and sinister characters to give even the master of suspense himself a serious case of vertigo. But in this scenario, the mayhem and murder are all too real. Self proclaimed movie geek and divorced thirtysomething Roy Milano lives alone in a cramped Manhattan apartment, toiling as a freelancer to make ends meet. It s a life perfectly suited to the creator of Trivial Man, Roy s self published newsletter filled with tidbits of little known Tinseltown lore for the delight of other fringe dwelling cinemaphiles. And it s a tantalizing phone call from one such kindred spirit that thrusts Roy headlong into his waking noir nightmare. I ve got The Magnificent Ambersons, declares Alan Gilbert, host of a homemade cable TV show about the silver screen, who now claims to possess the rarest of the rare: the long lost and never released complete print of Orson Welles s classic follow up to Citizen Kane. But when Roy arrives at his fellow movie maven s abode to sneak a peek at celluloid history, the front door is ominously open, Alan Gilbert is dead, and The Magnificent Ambersons is nowhere in sight. Even though the cops arrest a local drug addict for the murder, Roy knows they re wrong because the theft of the movie masterpiece points to a different kind of junkie. The kind Roy knows only too well…
and the kind he s certain only he can catch. But Roy Milano is no Sam Spade, even if he does run into more gun toting goons, sucker punches, and double crosses than Bogey on a busy day. And the suspects prove to be anything but usual including a bodybuilding film fanatic obsessed with bizarre rumors about an A list actress, a rotund reporter who holds Hollywood in thrall via red hot Internet dispatches from his parents baseme*nt, and a starstruck street punk with a thousand voices. And then there s the transatlantic love triangle that finds Roy caught between his very own eager Gal Friday and a sultry Spanish siren with a stunning secret. But when the bodies start to fall faster than a box office bomb, Roy must cut to the chase in his perilous quest to save the Holy Grail of cinema and unmask a killer before everything fades to black. From the Hardcover edition.
The Shooting Script
Following his critically acclaimed novel The Cutting Room, Laurence Klavan returns with The Shooting Script. Establishing shot: New York City, present day. Zoom in on a run down tenement building, somewhere west of Times Square, the home of Roy Milano, a thirtyish, divorced typesetter who lives for the movies. In fact, by pursuing the legendary uncut print of Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, Roy has become something of a minor celebrity among the fellow misfit film fanatics he caters to in his homemade newsletter, Trivial Man. But there s nothing trivial when Roy s old rival Abner Cooley shows up with a check in his hand and the words Someone is trying to kill me on his lips. With his mother ailing, Roy needs the money as badly as Cooley needs someone to head off a trigger happy stalker who s determined to put both him and his controversial new screenplay into permanent turnaround. And though Roy does his best, like many a private eye before him, he quickly finds his head turned by an enticing distraction. Not a femme fatale, but a flick. Roy is all but powerless to resist an e mail from a mysterious fan that lures him with the promise of an elusive treasure as fiercely sought after by the celluloid cognoscenti as the Ark of the Covenant was by Indiana Jones. It s Jerry Lewis’ famous unreleased drama, The Day the Clown Cried. But when he arrives at a rendezvous too late to save a dying man, Roy realizes he s stumbled into a dangerous race to possess a piece of cinema history. To catch up, he ll have to match wits with a rogues gallery: a bored and bitter superstar comedian, a hot shot producer turned drugged out has been, a ferocious German actor who likes to role play off camera, a mercurial director with a scary sense of humor, and a hard bitten cop who s mad about movies. Meanwhile, Roy will be tempted by the wiles of three fetching females and tormented by a single minded psychopath with more faces than Lon Chaney. He ll even go on location, pursuing and being pursued from the mansions of the Hamptons to the harbors of Maine, the boulevards of L.A. to the canals of Amsterdam. No one s ever gone to this much trouble just to see a movie. But for Roy, the reward far outweighs the risk. And a chance to glimpse the Big Picture might just be worth coming face to face with the Big Sleep. From the Hardcover edition.
City of Spies
Mystery, intrigue, and pastries abound in this World War II spy tale Evelyn typically satisfies her longing for adventure with the help of a pencil and a sheet of paper. But when she makes a new friend, Tony, she’s happy to abandon her art for a real life search for spies. When the two accidentally uncover a genuine mystery, it looks like Evelyn might end up in the kind of adventure she writes in her comics! Susan Kim, Laurence Klavan, and Pascal Dizin present a period piece that creates an inviting world you won t want to resist.
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