The Lost Coast

by Roger L Simon

Overview

Times have certainly changed for Moses Wine since the days of his first case in 'The Big Fix'-he's gone from cheap detective to respected private investigator in just twenty-five years. Add in a beautiful girlfriend and a lucrative business with a roster of corporate clients, and he should be feeling on top of the world. But he's not. In fact, he feels as though he's lost touch with his roots, now 'living the kind or bourgeois live I once reviled, ' as he notes. Moses Wine of the sixties has been pushed aside by the lure of vacations at Lake Tahoe, expensive meals, and unlimited access to courtside seats at Los Angeles Lakers games. Now the shadow of Wine's radical days has come back to haunt him. His college-age son, Simon, a radical environmentalist, has been accused of killing a logger in Northern California. Allying himself with his hostile ex-wife, Wine heads off to find the real killer whether it's Simon or not! Laced with Roger L. Simon's mordant wit, California politics and not-so-casual sex, 'The Lost Coast' is vintage Wine at its best. Ever restless, ROGER L. SIMON has spent his life moving between books and movies, gaining distinction in both. In books, he is best known for the seven Moses Wine detective novels, which have won prizes in the U.S. and Great Britain and been published in over a dozen languages. In film, most prominent among his six produced screenplays-including his adaptation of The Big Fix-is Enemies, A Love Story, for which Simon was nominated for an Academy Award.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781876963484
Publisher:	Ipicturebooks
Publication date:	11/28/2011
Pages:	196
Sales rank:	659,444
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.45(d)

Editorial Reviews

Hip Sleuth Ages Nicely in The Lost Coast
By Dick Lochte, Special to The Times

When Roger L. Simon awoke his counterculture sleuth Moses Wine from a nine-year literary nap with the 1997 mystery The Lost Coast, few of his fans got the word. As Simon says in an introduction to the new trade edition (ibooks, $14, 256 pages), "Not only did [his publisher] not advertise or promote the book...they printed it on paper so cheap the pages started to turn brown around the edges before the books even got out of the stores." Rude treatment for one of the more entertaining and emotionally charged entries in the popular series. In Coast, the rebellious spirit that motivated "the people's detective" in his 1973 debut novel, The Big Fix, seems to have been inherited by his son, Simon, with tragic results. A member of an eco-terrorist group in Northern California, the young Wine is being sought by the police for a tree-spiking that resulted in a logger's death. Moses motors north from L.A. to do what he can for the boy. Not only does he have to deal with smarmy lawmen, aggressive militants on both sides of the logging issue and a ruthless cadre of killers, he's faced with a seemingly ungrateful child, a hostile ex-wife and his former best friend with whom said wife had the affair that put paid to their marriage. Author Simon provides us with action, suspense, humor and bright dialogue aplenty, but it's his narrator-detective's approach to life that has distinguished this series. In The Lost Coast, middle age may have shaken his confidence and smoothed the edge of his hipster attitude, but fueled by fatherly love, Moses Wine is still a force to reckon with and to read with pleasure.

L.A. Times