Tuesday, December 02, 2008

A review of my novel

I got a review for BAD MOVIES from Kay M at Gather:

Bad Movies By Peter Joseph Swanson
December 02, 2008 12:58 PM EST


Bad Movies is the third and final book in Peter's Tinseltown Trilogy. If you've read Peter's Hollywood Sinners and The Joan Crawford Murders you might wonder if this book could get any wilder. The answer is yes. I will admit that I blushed more while reading this book than I did the others. Perhaps it is because this one is set in the 1970's, a time that I was alive, and so the 70's slang and situations seem more real to me. But blushing or no, I had to find out what happened to Jill.

Others seem to notice something different about Jill that she isn't completely aware of. When she has those fleeting and distant memories of Mexico and surgeries and a body part long gone, she brushes them aside and looks to her pretty manicure for reassurance.

She's a pretty girl who won the tile of Miss Milk in her hometown pageant and she arrives in Tinseltown believing that the modeling agencies will surely be impressed. But life is tough in the city and her new acquaintance, a pirouetting photographer, lets her know that she will have to pay some dues if she wants to be a star. He introduces her to the world of bad movie making, mobsters and her new boyfriend, a nudist named Bod.

While living in a shaky house near a nuclear power plant with Bod (whose name is actually Bob but thinks Bod sounds more studly), she works on the films that she believes will catapault her to stardom. How could a movie with a scantily clad cavewoman in a desert with giant turtles and simulated naughtiness not be a hit? It ended up being the kind of film that 70's SNL's Leonard Pinth Garnell would have deemed "exquisitely bad."

If bad movies were all that she had to worry about than life would be relatively easy. But no, there are murders and earthquakes and fires and a psycho in a leisure suit and rubber mask chasing her about. And those strange bits of fleeting memory........

This book is a smorgasbord of hilarious characters and outrageous situations. Read this book and you'll feel that you've taken a very entertaining walk on the wild side.

You can find Bad Movies in paperback at Amazon and at http://www.stonegarden.net