Robert Eversz author of the new
Nina Zero book: Burning Garbo
A Pop Noir Thriller from the Inspired
(or demented) Imagination that Shot Elvis and More...
Updated: Oct 20, 2003
Burning Garbo: A Nina Zero Novel, 2003
ISBN: 0743250133
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
$ 23
Publication Date: October, 2003On the morning of her thirtieth birthday, Zero scales the Malibu hillside about the estate of a reclusive film star who hasn't been seen in a decade. Within the next few hours, a man she takes for a bodyguard tries to kill her, she flees a brushfire that torches the star's estate, a toothless Rottweiller adopts her as his new best friend, and an arson investigator decides to prove she set the fire in order to photograph the results.
Fans of classic noir will love this stylish thriller and its vibrant, believable anti-heroine, an original in a genre of imitators.
Kirkus Reviews, August 1st
Paparazza Nina Zero's just trying to do her job, but people keep dying practically right under her lens.For years now, reclusive Hollywood Angela Doubleday has just vanted to be alone, and a photo of her might fetch $50,000. But the $250 Nina gets up-front to stake out Angela's place in the Malibu hills doesn't begin to pay for what happens after she levels her camera. A man runs toward her, demanding the camera, then shoots it dead and knocks her out. When she comes to, the Doubleday place is in flames, and after she disobeys the cops and leaves the scene, Nina, still on parole after her stretch for manslaughter (Killing Paparazzi, 2001), is blamed for igniting a star so charred she has to be identified by dental records. Not one to take the harassment of Det. Ted Claymore lying down, Nina and Dog, the Rottweiler who's followed her home, put their noses to the ground among members of Angela's household-not a close-knit crowd, and even more stratified now by the wealth one of them has suddenly come into-and her relatives, most of whom haven't seen her for as long as her fans. There'll be time for further wisecracking, police intimidation, and a pair of high-octane showdowns before Angela's finally laid to rest properly.
On a celebrity stakeout, an ex-con paparraza for Scandal Times crouches in the hills surrounding the Malibu estate for a movie star driven into seclusion by a stalker. A guard shoots the paparazza right in the camera lens, a wildfire erupts,engulfing the celebrity's home, and possibly the celebrity. This is about as noir a start as you can get in a burned-out L.A. novel. And Eversz keeps delivering deft noir touches and explosive action throughout this latest entry in the tough-girl Nina Zero series. Nina, just sprung from prison on a manslaughter conviction, becomes the focus of the investigation and the object of a gut-wrenching frame-up, thanks to her con status and the fact she was covering the fire. Eversz brings us into fairly traditional L.A. privage-eye land when the movie star's niece hires Zero to investigate the possible murder. This series gets its guts from the hard-up but resiliant Nina Zero. - Connie Fletcher.
Not that long ago, paparazza Nina Zero lived a normal life as small-town American girl Mary Alice Baker. She put bread on the table by photographing babies for their doting parents. If any criticism could be leveled at her, it would be that she had dubious taste in men, one of whom cajoled her into carrying a small package to the Los Angeles airport. The package exploded, taking out an entire terminal, and Mary Alice Baker went to jail for her unwitting role in the affair. Fast forward five years: out of the slammer on a shaky parole, she works as a tabloid scandal sheet photographer under the pseudonym Nina Zero. She sits patiently on a Malibu hillside above the home of a reclusive actress, in hope of snapping the $50,000 photo that none of her rivals has been able to get. Then all hell breaks loose: a man with a very large gun beats her senseless, an epic California brushfire greets her awakening, and a large toothless rottweiler emerges from the smoke beside her. The fire department and the police are not far behind, and Nina finds herself in the unsavory position of the parolee, guilty until proven innocent. Burning Garbo is the third book in Robert Eversz' hip series featuring plucky anti-heroine Nina Zero, and in many respects, it's the best. The action is nonstop, the Los Angeles images spot on, and the mood evocative of the noir classics that defined the early great L.A. crime novels.
Falsely accused of arson and murder, Eversz's series hero Nina Zero (Shooting Elvis, Killing Paparazzi) gets herself into more trouble than ever in the new installment. Formerly Mary Alice Baker, a children's photographer who landed in prison, upon parole she morphed into exotic Nina Zero, a celebrity paparazza for Scandal Time in L. A. While trying to take pictures of the reclusive retired movie star Angela Doubleday, Nina sees Doubleday's Malibu mansion go up in flames, is shot at by a strange man and finds herself adopted by a lovable, toothless rottweiler. When a vicious arson investigator blames Nina for the fire and - after human bones are discovered in the ashes - murder, she must prove her innocence. Along the way she befriends Angela's niece, Arlanda Cortes; Angela's godfather, Ben Turner; and a retired sheriff's deputy; she meets with a host of suspicious characters, including two brothers with a dark past who are also after Nana. Eversz noirishly evokes a Southern California - "Los Angeles is a city where people move to become someone they imagine themselves to be but aren't yet and most likely will never be" - and, despite frantic pacing and a convoluted plot, creates colorful, well-rounded characters. With plenty of celebrity satire and an ending that confounds expectations, this is a rollicking ride.
ISBN: 0312289022
Publisher: St. Martin's Minotaur
$23.95 Binding: Hardcover
Publication Date: January, 2002
Five years after blowing up LAX, by mistake...Former baby-portrait photographer Nina Zero is released from a nickel stretch for manslaughter at California Institute for Women. She buys a hot camera and drives to Vegas to marry an English tabloid photographer. She needs money. He needs a green card. They both need sex. It's a marriage made in heaven that swiftly goes to hell when hubby floats to the surface of Lake Hollywood one week later, deader than a Doberman's chew toy.
The Englishman isn't the only snuffed snapper, and as the newest ex-con off the cell block, Nina ranks as the chief suspect. Her parole officer threatens to bust her chops and the cops want to bus her back to prison but if she hunts down the killer she risks a bullet through her lens. Prison bars or a paparazza's grave. Some choice.
What's a formerly nice girl to do except kick butt?
At turns thrilling and hilarious, Killing Paparazzi roller blades through the sun- and blood-soaked streets of a culture obsessed with the pursuit of celebrity.
Nina Zero is a girl who attracts serious trouble--of the guns-a-blazing, knife-in-the-back variety. The "electrifying" demise of heavy metal group Death Row in a hotel hot tub gives Nina the opportunity to launch a new career as a paparazza. By turns hilarious and thrilling, Eversz has written a sharp sequel to his novel, Shooting Elvis.
February 13, 2002
Hard-boiled heroine Nina Zero was headed for prison at the fade-out of her last caper, Robert M. Eversz's Shooting Elvis (1996). Among other things, she'd unwittingly been responsible for blowing up a large part of LAX. She's at large and almost in charge in the author's new Killing Paparazzi (St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95, 310 pages). Tougher than beef jerky and considerably more cynical and wary than when she entered stir, Nina is quick to accept $2,000 for marrying a British photographer in need of a green card. They part on less than friendly terms, but when he becomes victim No. 3 in a series of paparazzi murders, she, by then a member of the shutterbug trade herself, decides to hunt down the killer. All the standard thriller elements are present, but Eversz's sardonic style and contemporary noir attitude transform them into fresh and flippant entertainment. "Killing," like its predecessor, is a street-smart, razor-sharp combination of crime fiction and Southern California social commentary. Here's narrator Nina on vanity billboards and the power of celebrity: "Further down Sunset, Madonna strained against her plywood frame with breasts big enough to crush small cars, Nathan Lane mugged with a mouse the size of a killer whale and the 30-foot-tall sunglassed face of Jack Nicholson howled at the moon. One Halloween or Oscar night they might come alive, leap free of the plywood, paint and paper that bound them, and with bodies to match the size of their stardom trample Hollywood to dust."
January 2001, page 817Everesz' hip thrillers sizzle with flashes of mordant wit and merciless mocking of Hollywood pretensions. Shooting Elvis (1996) introduced baby photographer turned revenging she-devil Nina Zero, who's back on the street after serving hard time for a spectacular crime spree. One man got her into that bizarre mess, and now another one gets her into a whole new world of violent trouble. Her green-card marriage to Brit Gabe, a paparazzo, or "princess killer", is supposed to be all business, but Nina, who quickly joins into his despised, dangerous, but lucrative profession, falls in love only to become a widow hell-bent on finding and punishing her husband's killer. Her pursuit takes her into the weird, vampirish realm of the paparazzi, the tabloid racket, and the sanctum sanctorum of C.a.'s richest and most decadent stars and real-estate pirates. The ensuing kinky-sex blackmail plot is neatly done, but it's Eversz's killer sense of humor and Nina's extreme rage, toughness, and quest for justice that make this smart and stylish mystery hum. - Donna Seaman
Reviewed by Richard Lipez - Sunday, December 16, 2001Tabloid Tinseltown: The city of Los Angeles, the Mother Church of noir film and fiction, has rarely been more gloriously crummy than in Robert M. Eversz's Killing Paparazzi (St. Martin's Minotaur, $23.95). This sequel to Shooting Elvis (1996) is as scabrously funny as Eversz's first novel featuring Nina Zero, née Mary Alice Baker, a young woman whose impatience with moral corruption is only a little less powerful than her hapless attraction to its many L.A. practitioners. Zero's is a wonderful fictional voice -- supple-minded, sexy, by turns tender and vulnerable and, when necessary, adroit at using punk attitude as a shield or a club.
A onetime Angelino, Eversz has lived in Prague for most of the last nine years, but his feel for L.A.'s essential creepiness has never been more acute. During daylight hours, the city's sidewalks -- this is Zero's first-person narrative -- "look merely empty. At night, they look neutron bombed. Humanity diminishes to dash-lit faces framed by automobile glass, and the ragged figures of the homeless racking up shopping-cart miles. . . . This was the city I liked best, an absence of cars, of brightly lit store interiors peopled by mannequins, a city where the few survivors gathered at gas stations like frightened animals to drink their fill and vanish back into the night."
No, most of the people who gas up at 3 a.m. in L.A. aren't really "frightened animals" -- they probably just work late or early -- but the noir style is, above all, about point of view, and Zero's is warped. She escaped an abusive poor family only to place her trust in the wrong men, including a boyfriend whose scams resulted in a five-year prison term for Zero after she shot several bad people and inadvertently blew up a section of LAX.
"I'd always been a good liar, even when I thought I was telling the truth," Zero says, so she should have been wary when Gabriel Burns described himself as "a complete rotter. Haven't told the straight truth about anything for twenty-two years and counting." On parole, Zero agrees to a green-card marriage to Burns, an English photographer with visa problems, in return for the $2,000 she hopes to use to launch her own career in photography. During their Las Vegas "honeymoon," Zero falls for Burns, in her own confused way, and then is devastated when he turns up beaten and stabbed to death.
The background to Burns's and other murders in Killing Paparazzi is "Chinatown"-style corrupt politics and real-estate maneuvering, but the foreground is nearly as blood-curdling: the supermarket-tabloid celebrity-photo business. Burns is one of its aces, and he brags that "most people just call me 'princess killer.' " Zero's pal and mentor, Frank Adams, has fled a left-wing weekly and moved to the tabs, "which he thought contained the most radical writing in America. The alternative newspapers had sold out to a radical chic consumerism as bourgeois as mainstream culture but the tabloid press he thought a great medium for ridiculing the American obsessions with wealth and fame."
These would-be Swifts and Menckens, if you buy that line, can land in hot water when, like Burns, they cultivate "a talent for the unflattering shot" -- or if a shot is worse than unflattering and could end the career of a star pulling down $20 million a picture, and extortion and blackmail enter into the mix. As Zero goes after Burns's killer -- naturally she's mistrusted and unloved by the L.A. cops -- she admits to herself that she isn't "a professional investigator or even a talented amateur. My greatest asset was desperation," she says. That desperation, along with Eversz's considerable talent, infuses this terrific thriller with tension and feeling, and will leave readers wanting more of Nina Zero.
When photographer Nina Zero, who accidentally killed a couple of guys and totaled one wing of LAX in Shooting Elvis (1996), is paroled after five years, the first thing she does is reinsert her earrings and nose stud. The second is marry Englishman Gabriel Burns, a freelance tabloid photographer, in exchange for $2,000 and a sexy weekend in Vegas. But then (oops) Burns is tortured and killed, and Nina, who swears she used to be a good girl when she was Mary Alice Baker, is soon terrorizing in the nicest possible way anyone who may have murdered her bridegroom to pull him off the big story involving a politician, a teenage heartthrob, four hookers, and a gal teaching a dog very naughty tricks. Her parole officer nears apoplexy, two homicide cops hassle her, two more associates of Burns die, and negatives substantiating the big story disappear. Nina responds by picking some locks, bashing some private eyes, and chasing down a Mercedes in a tanklike vintage Caddy. She sells a few pictures, shoots off a few toes, and decides who's guilty. But (oops) she's wrong, winds up in a locked car trunk, and has to dial 911 on her cell phone to makes matters come out right.Can a heroine whose tire-iron yearns for kneecaps still seem vulnerable and cuddly? Sure. Eversz may have pinned Nina down in the noir part of LA and given her heart to her abusive daddy, but if she moved to Trenton, she and Stephanie Plum would be the two most adorably dangerous gals in town.
Raymond Chandler's mean streets were never like those traversed in this new satirical novel by the author of Shooting Elvis. Nina Zero, Mary Alice Baker, is paroled after serving five years for blowing up LAX airport by mistake. Starting a new life for herself, she's going to earn two thousand dollars by marrying, so that her new English husband can obtain a green card. There's more: when members of a heavy-metal band called Death Row are electrocuted in a hotel hot tub, she sells pictures of their demise to a one-man photo agency and signs on as a paparazza. At last, she seems to have found her calling. But someone is killing L.A. paparazzi. As if that weren't enough, her husband's body is found beaten and stabbed. Properly enraged, Nina resolves to track down the killer herself. There's the expected unexpected ending, but half the fun is getting there in this noirish ramble across L.A.'s seedy underbelly, most notably Nina's deadpan narration ("Frank was one of those guys who could take a bite at the beginning of a sentence, chew through the middle and lunge for another bite without so much as a comma to separate mouthfuls"). Along the way Eversz manages to satirize rock groups, television, the glitterati and California correctional facilities, among other tempting targets.
When it comes to zany, there is no better protagonist than Robert Eversz's anti-heroine Nina Zero. In Shooting Elvis , the former baby-portrait photographer and Generation-X role model somehow managed to blow up Los Angeles International airport. After a five-year prison sentence Nina is back in Killing Paparazzi (Macmillan, £9.99), and her bad luck follows her as she is quickly accused of the murder of local photojournalists. Thrilling and hilarious, this is tongue-in-cheek crime with a sardonic twist.
Steven Bell's bizarre interview with Nina Zero, heroine of Killing Paparazzi.
Here's What the Critics Said About Shooting Elvis:
Boston Globe:
"Whip smart . . . An exciting and daringly original book."
New York Times:
"It's amazing what a new writer can do with the old routines. In Shooting Elvis,Robert M. Eversz took the hard-boiled formula for a terrorist-on-the-lam thriller and worked it into a feverishly hip satire of the Hollywood zeitgeist...With his slick style and cheeky cynicism, he is already an expert at setting heads to spinning."
Booklist:
"A stylish, hilariously cynical, high-action, pop-noir thriller'. It's not often you find a novel that combines good old hard-boiled smart talk with feisty feminism, punk fashion, and references to Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. What a blast."
Best Humorous Crime Novel, 1996: "Wild, wicked and off the wall. Fast, frightening and funny." - Val McDermid"A groovy little debut and no doubt about it." - Melody Maker
"Eversz's novel reads like The Catcher in the Rye with high explosives." - The Daily Telegraph
"A breathtaking roman noir." - Spiegel "Best crime novel of the Spring season." - Oslo Aftenposten
Kirkus: Starred Review
Breezy, laugh-out-loud school-of-Westlake caper with plenty of nasty, nihilistic twists, the best yet from screenwriter and crime novelist Eversz (Shooting Elvis, 1996, etc.). Part-time American scam artist and full-time cad Richard Milhous ``Nix'' Miller haunts the dreary streets of post-Communist Prague, adding mileage to his monthly inheritance checks by preying on female tourists who just want to have fun. Posing as a ``seven-figure'' Hollywood screenwriter researching the next Tom Cruise/Julia Roberts vehicle, Nix talks the talk long enough to pilfer his victims' pocketbooks. He then grandly rescues his distressed damsels, spending their money on rousing nights on the town that end in his apartment bedroom. Things go from bad--when he bilks the fiancée of a local police detective--to worse, as he falls for a similar scam worked by Monika, a sultry young woman who manages to clean him out without wrinkling his bedsheets. Hopelessly in love, Nix apes Woody Allen aping Bogart in Play It Again Sam as he tries to beat Monika at their mutual game. Things get ugly (as they must) when Nix murders Monika's loathsome pimp, Sven, and then tries to pretend that he's sufficiently ruthless, like the American movie heroes of his fantasies, to shrug off the consequences. Instead of a grudging admiration leading to love, Nix and his femme fatale find themselves in a scrambling contest for power and control. Delightfully dismal glimpses of pathetic tourists and gleefully corrupt Balkan landscapes don't lighten the dead-end grimness of a nihilistic, 1990s-style Innocents Abroad. Smart-alecky, frequently hilarious storytelling, with brainy send-ups of vampiric Europeans and idiotic Americans on the dark side of the post-Cold War Grand Tour.
Bookends Column: "Transgender Character Channeling, or How I Stopped Thinking Like a Man and Learned How to Write Like a Woman..." by Robert M. Eversz
Tangled Web (UK) Author Information - R.M. Eversz
Robert Eversz is the author of the Nina Zero series of crime novels, which have been translated into ten languages. He lives, at various times, in Los Angeles, Prague, and St. Pol de Mar, on the coast of Spain. More information about him can be found on the web site, www.ninazero.com. He can be reached by e-mail at <eversz@mac.com>
E-mail
Robert M. Eversz
Overbooked Mystery Pages:
Mystery Page
URL: http://www.overbooked.org/originals/everszbooks.html Overbooked (Book Links) is a volunteer project undertaken by Ann Chambers Theis: Collection Management Administrator, Chesterfield County (VA) Public Library. 9501 Lori Rd. or P.O. Box 297, Chesterfield, VA, 23832. Phone: 804.748.1760.
Overbooked is not an official Chesterfield County Public Library service. Overbooked does not endorse any commercial providers (or their products and services) linked to from this web site. Overbooked is hosted by CVCO - Central Virginia's Community Online.
Questions, comments, suggestions, corrections:
Ann Chambers Theis (aka Ann the Overbooked): theisa@co.chesterfield.va.us