Platinum Blues

About the Author:
William Deverell is the author of Trial of Passion, which won the Dashiell Hammett Award in 1998 and the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Mystery Novel in Canada. He is also the author of Needles. He lives in Pender Island, British Columbia.

This legal thriller exposes the seedy underside of the music business through the tale of Oliver Gulliver, a small-town lawyer in northern California who never tested his legal prowess in a major trial. His daughter returns home from San Francisco with her new addict rock star boyfriend, C. C. Gilley, who Oliver finds repulsive. But a quirky friendship develops between the men when Gilley accepts Oliver's dare to go cold turkey and begins writing songs for his comeback album. After the tune of one of Gilley's love songs airs on the radio, performed by a new band, Oliver sues a billion-dollar record company in Los Angeles for plagiarism. His success in capturing the admiration of the court wins him a restraining order against the band and confidence in his abilities as a lawyer.

About the Author:
William Deverell is the author of Trial of Passion, which won the Dashiell Hammett Award in 1998 and the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Mystery Novel in Canada. He is also the author of Needles. He lives in Pender Island, British Columbia.

Publishers Weekly

Canadian author Deverell's fourth U.S. suspense novel is a fast-paced, wickedly funny send-up of a rock music industry incestuously bedded down with corporate America. Oliver Gulliver, lawyer, widower and mayor of tiny Foolsgold, Calif., is suffering from midlife crisis, lustful fantasies and empty-nest syndrome. After his 18-year-old daughter, Elora, a college dropout, falls rapturously in love with alcoholic rock star C. C. Gilley, Gulliver finds himself defending the wild-man guitarist in a multimillion-dollar lawsuit involving a plagiarized song. When small-town hotshot Gulliver takes on the moguls of L.A.'s recording industry, the stakes escalate, and arson, murder and a sting gone haywire keep up the beat. Reeling off witty turns of phrase and uncanny plot twists, Deverell offers wonderfully sardonic takes on the worlds of music, law, Hollywood, Southern California and fatherhood--just for starters. (Sept.)

William Deverell’s first novel, Needles, won the $50,000 Seal Award, and, since then, he has published one work of non-fiction, Fatal Cruise, and ten further novels, including Trial of Passion, winner of the Hammett Prize for literary excellence in crime writing and Canada’s Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel. Deverell created the popular CBC Television series Street Legal and recreated its characters in a novel by that title. He is a founding member and past-president of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, a member of PEN Canada, the Screen Writers Guild, and has twice been chair of the Writers’ Union of Canada. He winters in Costa Rica and spends his summers on Pender Island in B.C.