In this special bonus episode, I chat with author (and dear friend of the show) Jordan Harper about his newly released novel EVERYBODY KNOWS. Featuring an extra special guest star Rob Belushi providing the introduction.
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Jordan is the Edgar-Award-winning author of She Rides Shotgun and Love and Other Wounds. Born and educated in Missouri, he now lives in Los Angeles, where he works as a writer and producer for television.
TWITTER: @JORDAN_HARPER
NEWSLETTER: WELCOME TO THE HAMMER PARTY
ABOUT EVERYBODY KNOWSTruth may be stranger than fiction but sometimes fiction predicts the truth. Jordan Harper’s new book EVERYBODY KNOWS is a combination of both. A propulsive LA crime thriller that James Patterson dubbed “the best mystery novel I’ve read in years,” is the story of Mae Pruett a "black-bag publicist" - she doesn't get the good news out, she keeps the bad news in – who works for “The Beast,” her name for the loose collection of lawyers, publicists and private security firms who protect and serve the wealthy and depraved of Los Angeles.
Chris Tamburro is Mae’s ex, a former cop fired for corruption and a fist on the Beast’s arm, working as muscle for a shady lawyer. They must both confront the bad things they aid and abet when Mae’s boss is gunned down in front of the Beverly Hills Hotel, dying with a secret Mae is determined to learn. Unraveling the mystery of her boss’s death takes them through an electric, pulpy vision of Los Angeles, a world of homeless camp bombers, drug-addled celebrities, cop gangs who mark their kills with tattoos, a livestreamed murder, and powerful men with a secret so dark they will kill to keep it.
Much of the novel is based Jordan’s experiences and those of his friends and co-workers in the film and TV industry, and the whisper network of Los Angeles, “Nobody Talks but Everybody Whispers.” To be authentic Jordan wrote the opening scene about Mae having to visit a client at The Chateau Marmot, at the Chateau Marmot. Every celebrity sighting in the book is based on a real sighting he had had in the actual place he had it. Jordan also interviewed a crisis manager who represented one of the biggest villains of the MeToo era and sat down with a Hollywood actress to talk about the pressures of her life. There are literally dozens of scandals and real-life crimes that are fictionalized in the novel, from the publicist gunned down on Sunset Blvd. to the firebombing of homeless camps and many, many more.
“EVERYBODY KNOWS rages through the City of Angels like a broken-dam flood. It’s got it all, but most of all it’s got deep insight. It’s the book everybody’s been waiting for.”
—Michael Connelly
"Just as Ellory mastered the atavistic heart of 1950's corruption, soJordan Harper has mastered articulating the Day-Glo Technicolor nightmare that is postmodern Los Angeles. EVERYBODY KNOWS is filled with ballsy movers and shakers, of course, but also plastic social media influencers, high-rent hoods, nihilistic cops, and the sorts of lost souls you’ll never forget.EVERYBODY KNOWS is an absolute tour de force, a trip through an exclusive alluring Hell where everyone gets what they want and just what they deserve.”
—SA Cosby, bestselling author of RAZORBLADE TEARS and BLACKTOP WASTELAND
“What a ride! If it were possible for James Ellroy and James M. Cain to produce a bastard love child, it would be EVERYBODY KNOWSby Jordan Harper. Awash in substance abuse, sex and demented violence, this is the LA of a good drug trip turned very bad.”
—Dennis Lehane, bestselling author of MYSTIC RIVER and SHUTTER ISLAND
“With EVERYBODY KNOWS, Jordan Harper takes on the Beast—the monstrous, corrupt, insatiable mass of organs that eats the losers and feeds the winners in capitalist America, with Hollywood as its base of operations. Our guides to this world (our world) are two of its own dirty players, a celebrity publicist with killer instincts and an ex-cop goon for hire, looking for survival and money and maybe, if it's in the cards, a little bit of redemption.It's a juggernaut of a novel, fast and high-impact, with a sense of doomed humor and bright, sharp teeth.”
—Steph Cha, LA Times Book Prize-winning author of YOUR HOUSE WILL PAY
“Good lord, this book is fantastic. EVERYBODY KNOWSis one of the best LA noir novels I've ever read.The writing is astonishingly good. It's a wild, honest, sharp, and suspenseful ride, full of wry observations about the nature of power and the cost of being good in a bad, bad world." —Attica Locke, bestselling author of HEAVEN, MY HOME and BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD
"Searing, timely, sprawling, EVERYBODY KNOWS pulls back Hollywood’s velvet curtain, exposing the sordid machinations on which the industry runs and the seamy complicity which keeps it humming.This is L.A. noir at its most incendiary." —Megan Abbott, bestselling author of THE TURNOUT
“Jordan Harper writers like he’s L.A.’s avenging angel.EVERYBODY KNOWS is timely. It’s timeless.It’s a knockout punch.” —James Kestrel, author of the Edgar Award-winning FIVE DECEMBERS
“EVERYBODY KNOWS is the best mystery novel I’ve read in years…Jordan Harper writes sentences, and in this case an entire book, that is both terrifying and exhilarating.” —James Patterson
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