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Hang-Up
Laura Carson is a woman in trouble.
A young and attractive divorcée, she is involved in a passionate but hopeless affair with a married man. Her fifteen-year-old daughter, Martha, resents the liaison and refuses further moral supervision from her mother, slipping out of their Los Angeles home at night and heading for the wild teeny-bopper scene on Sunset Strip.
One night Martha Carson does not come home, and so begins a desperate and suspenseful search that will take Laura Carson and Ben Riker, the sympathetic detective who has agreed to help, deep into Los Angeles' hippie underworld, a bizarre subculture dominated by acid-rock, suicidal surfers and orgiastic parties.
Young Martha Carson had gone to the Strip that night looking for action, and she found it when she met a dazzlingly good-looking hippie named Scotty Bannister. To Martha, as well as to Dave Grant, a gentle young folk-rock singer who had only that day taken up with Scott himself, Scotty Bannister is the personification of all that is stylish in the youth mystique today—the flower-power clothes, the communal pad in the hills over Los Angeles, and the Jag XKE which moves like an elegant extension of his golden surfer's body.
But Scotty Bannister is also a strangely driven young man who is hooked on danger in every form it comes in. Fast cars and big surf are one thing, but then the night he and Dave pick up Martha Carson, promising her a ride home, Scotty Bannister is ready for something that will really blast him out of his mind…
HANG-UP is an uncommon novel of psychological suspense in which the criminal element is not at first apparent. Beginning as a sensitive study of the generational gap and the curious and sometimes touching world of today's revved-up teenagers, the narrative moves deeper and deeper into the violence and horror that underlie some of the ostensibly glamorous and highly publicized aspects of contemporary American life.
A young and attractive divorcée, she is involved in a passionate but hopeless affair with a married man. Her fifteen-year-old daughter, Martha, resents the liaison and refuses further moral supervision from her mother, slipping out of their Los Angeles home at night and heading for the wild teeny-bopper scene on Sunset Strip.
One night Martha Carson does not come home, and so begins a desperate and suspenseful search that will take Laura Carson and Ben Riker, the sympathetic detective who has agreed to help, deep into Los Angeles' hippie underworld, a bizarre subculture dominated by acid-rock, suicidal surfers and orgiastic parties.
Young Martha Carson had gone to the Strip that night looking for action, and she found it when she met a dazzlingly good-looking hippie named Scotty Bannister. To Martha, as well as to Dave Grant, a gentle young folk-rock singer who had only that day taken up with Scott himself, Scotty Bannister is the personification of all that is stylish in the youth mystique today—the flower-power clothes, the communal pad in the hills over Los Angeles, and the Jag XKE which moves like an elegant extension of his golden surfer's body.
But Scotty Bannister is also a strangely driven young man who is hooked on danger in every form it comes in. Fast cars and big surf are one thing, but then the night he and Dave pick up Martha Carson, promising her a ride home, Scotty Bannister is ready for something that will really blast him out of his mind…
HANG-UP is an uncommon novel of psychological suspense in which the criminal element is not at first apparent. Beginning as a sensitive study of the generational gap and the curious and sometimes touching world of today's revved-up teenagers, the narrative moves deeper and deeper into the violence and horror that underlie some of the ostensibly glamorous and highly publicized aspects of contemporary American life.
222 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1968
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