High Fall

When Kiernan O'Shaughnessy shows up at the San Diego bluffs off Gliderport to watch the filming of a new movie, she hardly expects to run into a media circus. It turns out that a talented, confident nineteen-year-old stuntwoman named Lark Sondervoil has invited the press to watch her perform the Gaige Move - a notoriously difficult stunt, or "gag, " invented years earlier by a master gymnast named Greg Gaige. Gaige was killed in the middle of a stunt ten years earlier, and no one has ever performed up to his extraordinary standard. Until now. Expectations are high. But nobody - not the press, not the film crew, certainly not Kiernan herself - expects Lark's move to turn into disaster when she takes a misstep and plunges over the bluffs to her death. The filmmakers insist it's merely an accident - an occupational hazard of being in a dangerous profession. But Kiernan's curiosity about this case moves beyond the mere interests of justice. She had studied gymnastics herself once, long ago. And her teacher was none other than . . . Greg Gaige. As Kiernan relentlessly dogs the people who knew Lark, and who remember Greg, she exposes the darker side of the movie business. And she's forced to confront both the grim realities of the present, and the painful, half-buried ghosts of her past.