Raise the Devil

Scott Elliott Mystery #3

by Terence Faherty

How do you stop a vicious killer whose motive is vengeance and whose prey is a movie company on an isolated California ranch? In 1962, Scott Elliott, top operative of Hollywood Security, problem solvers of last resort, travels to Las Vegas to rescue a starlet, Beverly Brooks, who has fallen afoul of a move-struck gangster. When Brooks and the producer of her current film, a cut-rate Cleopatra, are later killed in a fiery plane crash, Elliott follows a bloody trail from the ranch to Los Angeles and back again. There he must deal with a murderous evil - and the knowledge that his actions may have unleashed it. Evoking the high summer of a lost American era while exploring the weaknesses and secret sins that led to its destruction, Raise the Devil is in every way a worthy sequel to Come Back Dead , winner of the Shamus Award for Best Private Eye Novel of the Year.

Genres: Mystery, Historical Fiction

288 pages, Hardcover

First published October 12, 2000

About the author

Terence Faherty (1954-) is an American author of mystery novels.

My name is Terence Faherty. I'm a storyteller whose stories most often take the form of mysteries. (A critic once noted, cryptically but correctly, that all my stories are mysteries, even the ones that aren't.) I do see basic storytelling and mystery solving as linked, because in so many stories the protagonist is trying to answer a question or right a wrong. This is why I see the mystery and especially the private eye story as a particularly straightforward form of storytelling: a problem is posed and a hero sets out to resolve it. (At least, it would be straightforward if all clients were forthcoming and truthful.)

I've written two series in book form. The Owen Keane series follows the bumpy life of a failed seminarian turned amateur sleuth (a job title I love). It's been nominated twice for the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award and once for the Anthony Award and it's won a Macavity Award from Mystery Readers International. The Scott Elliott series is set in old Hollywood during its decline and fall. Elliott, an operative for a shady security company, tries to slow that decline and fall in his own small way. Elliott has been nominated for three Shamus Awards from the Private Eye Writers of America and taken home two.


* Uncanny: Short story writen by Terence Faherty.

Series:
* Owen Keane Mystery
* Scott Elliott Mystery