The Dead Circus: A Novel

John Kaye’s two novels have established him as one of today’s most stunning chroniclers of Los Angeles, a city of rockers and private eyes, script girls and wiseguys, innocents and Charles Manson. In The Dead Circus it’s 1986. Gene Burk is an ex-cop, fanatical record collector, and private eye. Devastated by the death of his fiancee, Gene becomes obsessed with an unsolved mystery from his days with the LAPD: the late-sixties death of up-and-coming rockabilly star Bobby Fuller. As Gene attempts to reconstruct the circumstances that led to Fuller’s demise, he is unexpectedly contacted by a survivor of the Manson Family who needs Gene’s help to bury her past. As Gene travels back in history to the moment Manson partied alongside Bobby Fuller and the Beach Boys, John Kaye spins a masterful, disturbing portrait of twenty years in Los Angeles, of the promise of the sixties and the hellish realities of the morning after.