Bungalow Heaven

Talk about a killer movie…

The story begins on a sweltering, wind-swept night in a Los Angeles suburb. The owner of a rundown old theater is shot dead behind the snack bar, an assassination disguised to look like a holdup gone wrong. And the story begins eighty years earlier, MGM Studios, 1924, when a mad genius of a director creates a masterpiece, only to have it taken from him by the studio brass and, presumably, destroyed.

How are they connected—this “lost legend” of the Silent Film era, and this seemingly random act of violence at a crumbling movie house eight decades later? That is the question that keeps readers devouring the pages of Bungalow Heaven, a gripping, unpredictable, and surprisingly funny crime novel based in part on a true story. Warner escorts the reader from the barrios of East L.A. to the back lots and boardrooms of a Hollywood Studio to the oak-lined streets of “Bungalow Heaven,” the quiet neighborhood where all secrets are ultimately revealed. Along the way, we dig deep into the lives of a memorable cast of characters: Cam Healy, the onetime Hollywood hot shot, now on the skids, with a penchant for soft-rock oldies, prescription meds, and murder; Hernan Escudero, the former gang member looking to move up to a more sophisticated class of crime; and Lita Ritenour, the single mother and lead homicide detective, faced with a mystifying string of murders, who may have even more to lose than the suspects themselves—along with a vivid supporting cast of criminals and cops, kooks and cranks, and celebrity wannabes, has-beens, and hangers-on.

Wildly original and impossible to put down, Bungalow Heaven is a tale of crime and its consequences that slices through the glamorous façade of Tinsel Town to reveal the savage ambition beating in the dark heart of the Hollywood Dream.