Excerpt from Windhall by Ava Barry, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Eleanor Hayes, dead at twenty-six, never to age another day. I came to know her face by heart, the famous dark eyes and bowed lips, which were her trademark, the languorous gaze she cast upon her victims. At the peak of her career, she was the wealthiest woman in California, but this distinction did little to raise her social habits: weekends found her dancing barefoot in dim little bars of downtown Los Angeles, between smoky ghosts and Philip Marlowe types, or else up in the hills, riding bareback through the gorse and sagebrush. At night, they pitched tents and fell asleep to the sound of coyotes calling, waking up to see a glorious sunrise break over the dusty hamlets of Los Angeles.

And Theo. As the years faded away and the murder went unsolved, Eleanor became the woman in a myth, the details of her life blurred. Theo was released, in the end; the case fell apart. He was a secretive man with too many stories to tell, someone for whom the past and future could be rewritten. Still alive, all these decades later, but unseen since the trial.

As the years passed, Theo joined the ranks of true crime lore, a cabal of wife-killers and opulent eccentrics whose names were tossed around as gossip rather than injunction. The '60s passed, and then the '70s; his legend was replaced first by the death of Marilyn Monroe and then the Manson killings, the deaths of Elvis and John Lennon. Home televisions replaced the fanaticism of grand old movie theaters. Fans became caged by domesticity and the Internet. Celebrities shrank to fit the size of a mobile phone, easily tucked away for cigarette breaks at work. Theo was forgotten, mostly, relegated to a past of black-and-white movie screens; the grand old days. And then, late one autumn, he came back to me.

Excerpted from Windhall by Ava Barry. Copyright © 2021 by Ava Barry. Excerpted by permission of Pegasus Crime. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.