Clea's Moon

Once he was Sierra Lane, hero to countless youngsters in a series of B-movie westerns.

Now, after a spell in prison, John Ray Horn lives on the margins of 1940s Los Angeles. Blacklisted by the studios and divorced by his wife, he earns a shaky living by collecting gambling debts for his old Indian co-star, Joseph Mad Crow.

One night Scotty Bullard, an old friend, contacts Horn soon after the death of his own father, a powerful real estate developer. Among the elder Bullard's possessions Scotty has found a collection of obscene photographs of underage girls, one of whom he thinks is Clea, Horn's stepdaughter before his divorce.

Within two days, Scotty has met a violent death. And soon afterward, Horn's ex-wife tells him that Clea, who is now sixteen, has run away. Horn feels instinctively that Scotty was murdered by someone who wants to keep the photos secret, and that Clea's disappearance was somehow triggered by the emergence of the pictures. He is driven to find the killer of his old friend, but his most urgent need is to find Clea, the one bright memory from his failed marriage.

Horn's search takes him from neon-lit piers to wooded canyons, from estates in the Hollywood Hills to the clubs on Central Avenue, the Harlem of L.A. He doubts that he was ever the hero he once portrayed, but he knows that he must come to believe in himself if he is to save Clea.