Title: Skinflick (#5 in the Dave Brandstetter series) Author: Joseph Hansen Published by: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979 ISBN: 0-03-048931-8 [hardcover, 194 pages]
Gerald Dawson was an angry little man who set out to change a world he feared and hated, and ended up murdered. The police are sure they've got the killer -- the owner of a porno shop Dawson and his zealous cohorts had trashed. But Dave Brandstetter, crack insurance investigator, won't buy it. Where had Dawson been all night on the date he was murdered? Why does no one admit knowing? Dawson's weird wife and son are not only mum, they seem frightened.Dave is accustomed to sorting out the facts from the appearances, but this is a case of peculiar extremes. If Dawson claimed to be a born-again Christian, whose are the girlie magazines his son so frantically tries to burn? And was it really the elder Dawson who was seen with a runaway teenager at a Sunset Strip disco?
Dave's quest for answers takes him from an evangelical church to a porno film studio, from the sunlit world of sleek cabin-cruisers to the neon nightmare of teenage drugs and prostitution, from a basketball-playing preacher to a tall transvestite who wants to be Dave's Nora Charles.
But the answers wait far from the squalid glitter of Hollywood, in a windswept midnight wilderness, where Dave Brandstetter's life comes dramatically close to a mad and savage end.
Return to Jay's West Hollywood Home Return to Mystery Send to Jay
