Title: Backtrack Author: Joseph Hansen Published by: Foul Play Press, 1982 ISBN: 0-914378-96-1 [hardcover, 167 pages]
Through the eyes of a bright, cocky, vulnerable adolescent, Joseph Hansen focuses on a Hollywood the glamour peddlers never show. By turns shocking and funny, Backtrack is a dead honest novel of growing up fast in a world most of us have never imagined, told with power and tenderness.Did handsome, charming Eric Tarr, small-time actor, really kill himself? He left behind a lot of wreckage -- broken promises, broken hearts, broken lives. Backtracking through his father's past, young Alan, another of the betrayed, begins to see how many men and women might have been bitter enough to murder Eric Tarr.
Was it the rising starlet whose beauty and career Eric destroyed in a drunken car crash? Or the sad owner of an expensive restaurant whom Eric had been bleeding for money? Or the agent who built Eric's reputation, on whom he turned his back? Or the bit player Eric robbed of the best part he'd ever been offered? Or are the police right -- did Eric merely pick up the wrong hustler one lonely night?
By the time Alan learns the truth, it becomes his own personal tragedy and, both legs in casts, he waits helpless in a storm-shaken deserted house on the beach for his father's killer to find and kill him too.
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