Body on the Backlot

Detective Joan Lambert works within the fabric of the LA landscape, solving cases with a combined tapestry of plodding police work, bang-on perceptions of the human psyche and guts.

For the last five years, media madness has created fresh hell for LAPD’s imminent Homicide investigator, Joan Lambert. She thinks she's seen everything until the victim in her latest case gets up and walks out of the morgue. Ten missing women, a small boy, and a fanatical voodoo cult thrust Joan into an investigation that will put her life and her career on the line. She has got to shut it all down before eleven people are sacrificed for the film and music career of a young starlet. When a connection is made to a private pharmaceutical experiment that suspends the very essence of life, creating real-life zombies, Joan avails every resource she has—black dog hairs, a posh transvestite, a psychic who offers dubious insights and the clues given to her by Hector, a dying pimp whose specialty is runaways. To make it work, Joan takes matters into her own hands, proving her grit as one of LA’s elite investigators.

Eva Montealegre grew up on her father’s showboat, The River Queen, docked in St. Louis. It was a hotbed of adultery, politics, delicious food and great music. Her mother, an investigative journalist, dragged Eva through every neighborhood in St. Louis from aristocratic homes to crime infested alleys. A combination of earthy artistic expression and intellectual pursuits formed Eva from a young age with in-depth engagements into the worlds of art, film, theatre and music, ultimately forging her into the LA crime author of Red Carpet Noir.