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Ex-reporter Benjamin Justice is trying to come to terms with his HIV status, no job, and no hope. Then the daughter of a onetime Hollywood hunk offers him a job to ghostwrite a payback book after a sleazy bio links the actor to a shadowy world of sinister perversion and blood-chilling crimes. When she's found dead with a needle in her arm, Justice goes looking for the truth....
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Benjamin Justice was once one of the most prominent and respected journalists in Los Angeles, even the country. But when it was discovered that he'd invented the sources for his Pulitzer Prize winning series of articles, he lost everything - his job, his reputation, his friends. Now, many years later, Justice has finally published a memoir revealing the truth behind the events that cost him so much and made him permanently radioactive in the journalism community. And this book may be his last chance to turn things around, to make a living writing as he'd always wanted. But his memoir brings out more than the truth - it brings out long-forgotten , long hidden ghosts from his past. And Justice finds himself, and everyone/everything he holds dear under attack. ...
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Following the death of his lover and a scandal involving his Pulitzer Prize-winning article, crime reporter Benjamin Justice has fallen into a hazy, alcoholic reclusiveness, hiding out in the West Hollywood neighborhood known as the Norma Triangle. He is called back to the world of the living by an unexpected, and unwelcome, visit from Harry Brofsky, his former boss. Brofsky wants Ben to do some background work (strictly off the record) with another reporter on the investigation of a seemingly motiveless killing outside a local gay bar. Sucked in for reasons even he doesn't quite understand, Justice finds himself back in the life of gay bars, spurned lovers, dysfunctional families, and tawdry secrets--all the things he had been trying to escape. While fending off passes from his sexy, young female partner, he finds himself falling hopelessly in love with the man he must ultimately nail for murder--a killing that turns out to have far more personal and political implications than a simple bias crime. "Simple Justice" is a subtly plotted mystery that takes a piercing look at not only violent crime but violations of the heart and soul in the sometimes glamorous, more often dark and dangerous gay life of West Hollywood....
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When reporter Alexandra Templeton drags Benjamin Justice to a party thrown by a legendary Hollywood screenwriting instructor, they stumble into the murder of Reza Jafari, a young, wannabe screenwriter with more enemies that completed scripts. The prime suspect is the victim's roommate, Danny Romero, a young man who will die of AIDS in jail, unless Justice can solve the mystery first, and allow Danny the dignified death he desperately wants. Among the other suspects: a macho Australian action director, with his own dark secrets and a career in decline; a former starlet, now the voluptuous widow of a recently deceased studio executive, who has a good reason to want the victim dead; a high-powered female agent, as button-downed and driven as she is deceptive; a Persian restaurant owner, the victim's devoutly Muslim father, who has a troubling violent streak; and an up-and-coming lesbian film producer, as tough as she is smart. His search for clues takes Justice into musty Hollywood film archives, and between the lines of several screenplays, while putting his own life in grave danger. After the murder of an elderly screenwriter who used Reza Jafari as a younger "front" to pitch his scripts, the murder plot shifts into high gear, propelling Justice and Templeton into a raging fire that consumes the Hollywood Hills, burning steadily toward the famous Hollywood Sign--and the identity of a cold-blooded killer....
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