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L. A. Stalker
Meet Pandora Collins, Hollywood bombshell. The sex-addicted movie star has a problem; someone is stalking her. A twisted, demented psychopath no one can stop, not even the detectives of LAPD's crack stalker detail. In a fit of desperation, she takes the law into her own hands. She hires someone to take care of her stalker.A trained assassin. A killer without remorse.But Pandora soon learns that the cure she called upon is worse than the disease.From the award-winning author of Undercover White Trash and In The Way That Elephants Do comes a thought-provoking tale of sex, murder, love and redemption in the City of Angels.
296 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 2002
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August 19, 2026
Hollywood, California. The place where every celebrity has a personal stalker, especially if they’re attractive like actor Pandora Collins. The police, of course, can never quite pin enough on these perverts to put them behind bars. So Dora does what any desperate, jaded, slightly unhinged Hollywood star would do: she hires a contract killer through a former drug supplier. An initiative driven more by sheer panic than by any actual plan.
Naturally, once the gun-for-hire eliminates the original stalker, he decides the real fun is just beginning. Now he gets to play the long game with Dora—because she hired him, after all, which makes her complicit, and because he can always threaten her two best friends (Tasha and Mark) or the detective she’s starting to care about. Detective Jerry Leger, for his part, has to confront his own nightmares, fears, and insecurities if he’s going to pull her out of this mess—both the killer’s and the self-destructive habits she’s been using to paper over childhood wounds that go straight back to her father.
PLOT TWIST / SETTINGS
Kilpatrick initially sells you the classic cookie-cutter crime setup: beautiful woman, sick killer, protective hero who will eventually sleep with the beautiful woman. Then the hired gun realizes he can keep the game going indefinitely, and the story gets properly nasty.
The settings feel lived-in. The writing aims for hard-edged, cynical Hollywood noir and mostly lands it. A funeral scene where the “Beautiful People” look like “zombies from a low-budget horror flick” in their “finest designer fashions of funeral black,” while the paparazzi form a “wave of cretins” or a “gauntlet,” is pure contemptuous set-piece gold. You can smell the hairspray and the moral rot.
CHARACTERS
Dora is the show-stealer. Pushing forty, still beautiful, still “supple” (the text will not let you forget that hourglass figure), talented, jaded, self-aware, physically capable, and emotionally detached from the industry’s endless rituals.
Dialogue like this is why you root for her even when she’s making terrible decisions:
“How about Dora? That’s what my friends call me.”
“Am I your friend now?”
“On second thought, asshole; you can call me Your Majesty. How about that?”
Kilpatrick isn’t precious with anyone. Attractive or not, nobody’s safe. Stakes are real. Consequences are real. That alone puts this a notch above a lot of the soft-focus thriller crowd.
AND… ACTION!
The action sequences are the book’s strongest suit—tense, cinematic, dual-POV urgency that prioritizes immediacy, sensory detail, and tactical clarity over pretty sentences. This is where the writing mostly succeeds, even when it has rough edges.
WARNING
The graphic content stays within certain bounds, but those bounds still include a lot of sexual and psychological abuse once the contract killer (Bill) starts showing up almost daily. Lines like the one where Dora counts the ridges on the lampshade while Bill thrusts and stares at himself in the mirror appear frequently in the last act. Some readers will bounce hard. Fair warning.
ISSUES
The prose leans heavily into telling rather than showing. Clichéd and simplistic phrasing undercuts tension and character depth more often than it should. Stock similes (“They were going to drop his ass like a hot potato”), repetitive labels (“Beautiful People,” “Beautiful Couple”), and the occasional grafted-on purple patch (“But underneath that facade was a scared little girl…”) keep reminding you this is serviceable pulp rather than lean, sharp noir. It’s functional. It’s not polished.
CONCLUSION
L.A. Stalker is readable and has genuine momentum thanks to its plot twists and a richly drawn, bitter, still-human Dora. It understands the grotesque theater of Hollywood—the paparazzi as a parallel predator class, the blurred line between public performance and private terror, an LA saturated with image and surveillance. The cynical tone sells the idea that the city consumes its own.
What it doesn’t deliver is the tighter suspense, investigative detail, or escalating threat the premise and characters deserve. This is competent mid-list / strong self-published thriller writing, not early Ellroy or the sharper modern LA noir practitioners. It has attitude and a clear point of view. It just substitutes that attitude a little too often for sharper observation or fresher language.
Energetic. Readable. Rarely memorable on the sentence level. Serviceable foundation work that keeps the pages turning once the stalking plot properly tightens—but it doesn’t rise above competent genre execution. It knows what it wants to be. It just doesn’t always write it with the precision the material deserves.
Did it touch me? Hell yes, it did. But here’s the part that stings a little: Kilpatrick was sitting on a potential show-stopper—the kind of book that could’ve grabbed you by the throat and refused to let go. Instead, it settled into being a solid, decent novel that digs into a very dark and very real world with clear eyes and zero flinching.
Not a failure. Just a damn good effort that left me wishing the execution had matched the ambition every single step of the way. Your Strange Girl still felt it. She just also saw the greater version that almost was.
Naturally, once the gun-for-hire eliminates the original stalker, he decides the real fun is just beginning. Now he gets to play the long game with Dora—because she hired him, after all, which makes her complicit, and because he can always threaten her two best friends (Tasha and Mark) or the detective she’s starting to care about. Detective Jerry Leger, for his part, has to confront his own nightmares, fears, and insecurities if he’s going to pull her out of this mess—both the killer’s and the self-destructive habits she’s been using to paper over childhood wounds that go straight back to her father.
PLOT TWIST / SETTINGS
Kilpatrick initially sells you the classic cookie-cutter crime setup: beautiful woman, sick killer, protective hero who will eventually sleep with the beautiful woman. Then the hired gun realizes he can keep the game going indefinitely, and the story gets properly nasty.
The settings feel lived-in. The writing aims for hard-edged, cynical Hollywood noir and mostly lands it. A funeral scene where the “Beautiful People” look like “zombies from a low-budget horror flick” in their “finest designer fashions of funeral black,” while the paparazzi form a “wave of cretins” or a “gauntlet,” is pure contemptuous set-piece gold. You can smell the hairspray and the moral rot.
CHARACTERS
Dora is the show-stealer. Pushing forty, still beautiful, still “supple” (the text will not let you forget that hourglass figure), talented, jaded, self-aware, physically capable, and emotionally detached from the industry’s endless rituals.
Dialogue like this is why you root for her even when she’s making terrible decisions:
“How about Dora? That’s what my friends call me.”
“Am I your friend now?”
“On second thought, asshole; you can call me Your Majesty. How about that?”
Kilpatrick isn’t precious with anyone. Attractive or not, nobody’s safe. Stakes are real. Consequences are real. That alone puts this a notch above a lot of the soft-focus thriller crowd.
AND… ACTION!
The action sequences are the book’s strongest suit—tense, cinematic, dual-POV urgency that prioritizes immediacy, sensory detail, and tactical clarity over pretty sentences. This is where the writing mostly succeeds, even when it has rough edges.
WARNING
The graphic content stays within certain bounds, but those bounds still include a lot of sexual and psychological abuse once the contract killer (Bill) starts showing up almost daily. Lines like the one where Dora counts the ridges on the lampshade while Bill thrusts and stares at himself in the mirror appear frequently in the last act. Some readers will bounce hard. Fair warning.
ISSUES
The prose leans heavily into telling rather than showing. Clichéd and simplistic phrasing undercuts tension and character depth more often than it should. Stock similes (“They were going to drop his ass like a hot potato”), repetitive labels (“Beautiful People,” “Beautiful Couple”), and the occasional grafted-on purple patch (“But underneath that facade was a scared little girl…”) keep reminding you this is serviceable pulp rather than lean, sharp noir. It’s functional. It’s not polished.
CONCLUSION
L.A. Stalker is readable and has genuine momentum thanks to its plot twists and a richly drawn, bitter, still-human Dora. It understands the grotesque theater of Hollywood—the paparazzi as a parallel predator class, the blurred line between public performance and private terror, an LA saturated with image and surveillance. The cynical tone sells the idea that the city consumes its own.
What it doesn’t deliver is the tighter suspense, investigative detail, or escalating threat the premise and characters deserve. This is competent mid-list / strong self-published thriller writing, not early Ellroy or the sharper modern LA noir practitioners. It has attitude and a clear point of view. It just substitutes that attitude a little too often for sharper observation or fresher language.
Energetic. Readable. Rarely memorable on the sentence level. Serviceable foundation work that keeps the pages turning once the stalking plot properly tightens—but it doesn’t rise above competent genre execution. It knows what it wants to be. It just doesn’t always write it with the precision the material deserves.
Did it touch me? Hell yes, it did. But here’s the part that stings a little: Kilpatrick was sitting on a potential show-stopper—the kind of book that could’ve grabbed you by the throat and refused to let go. Instead, it settled into being a solid, decent novel that digs into a very dark and very real world with clear eyes and zero flinching.
Not a failure. Just a damn good effort that left me wishing the execution had matched the ambition every single step of the way. Your Strange Girl still felt it. She just also saw the greater version that almost was.
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