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KILLING PAPARAZZI
by Robert M. Eversz
St. Martin's Minotaur, January 2002
310 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 0312289022


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Hold tight! Nina Zero's back and she moves fast. We left her in the author's last book, SHOOTING ELVIS, where she started out as a young innocent photographer of babies in Los Angeles and finished committing multiple high crimes and misdemeanors, including blowing up an airport. We pick her up in this new book as she finishes five years in prison and gets paroled.

She's virtually broke and she's assigned to a tough woman parole officer who warns her that the slightest infraction of the rules will send her back to prison again. However, Nina had already arranged to break the rules even before her release day. Via another prisoner, she agreed for $2,000 to marry an immigrant Englishman who needed an American marriage in order to stay in the U.S. to pursue his occupation as a freelance photographer for the gutter press. That's fraud and a violation of parole regulations.

She unexpectedly falls in love with her new husband and disappointedly finds he strings her along that he loves her, too, but really regards her as just a sex partner. She spends most of her $2,000 on a used old -- really used and old -- Cadillac because she knows that in L.A. it's the appearance that counts, and a Cad is still a Cad.

She goes to an old friend, Cass, who's now a big-time TV producer with reality TV. Her show deals with gruesome footage of murder and accident victims and is called "Meat Wagon." Cass, juggling a dozen phone calls at a time, doesn't have much time, but takes her to lunch. Nina can hardly get a word in as Cass still juggles her calls. When Nina finally asks for a job, Cass says "Sorry, no." She has a full staff and would have to fire someone to accommodate Nina. Further, she couldn't recommend Nina to anyone else because recommending a ex-con could conceivably hurt her reputation. Nina reminds Cass that she owes her a favor. Cass jumps up to leave saying, "I owed you lunch, and I just paid for it."

Following Cass on a night call, Nina is able to get some hot photos that she sells to give herself a little breathing room. Think Cass would be mad? Hardly, instead she calls Nina and offers her a tip on a current vicious murder, a good chance for Nina to get more sellable photos. As Nina starts to take pictures, she recognizes the victim -- her husband. Cass is there, too, and now has her camera crew start taking video shots of Nina in the moment of greatest impact. What are friends in L.A. for anyway?

Nina keeps digging herself in deeper and deeper. She's grown tough and can wreak physical havoc with a male opponent. She takes a gun away from one guy and keeps it under her car seat -- that's another parole violation. She's now dealing with people who are into bestial sex, blackmail, drugs, mayhem, and murder. The cops keep pushing her around. Another paparazzo is viciously murdered, and the indications are that the killer is now after Nina.

There's no stopping the action in KILLING PAPARAZZI, and Nina goes through more living, or more living hell, in just a couple of days than the average person does in a lifetime. In some ways the story reminds me of Dashiell Hammetts's THE MALTESE FALCON, but, don't get me wrong, there's no copycat in Robert Eversz. His plots, fast action, dialogue, tersely exciting narrative style, and plain-spoken satire are all original. I think if a study were made we'd find out that people read an Eversz book at a far faster rate than they do for other books. Their reading speed goes up as their excitement goes up. Just like Nina provided Cass with the material for a TV show, I wouldn't be surprised if Nina provides Eversz with a real-life TV offer. I don't think we've seen the end of Nina yet. Robert Eversz's next book, coming out in October 2003, is titled BURNING GARBO.

Reviewed by Eugene Aubrey Stratton, July 2003

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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