Fiora left me on my own for the summer.

Big mistake.

When you’re looking for trouble, it isn’t hard to find. Only thing unexpected was ending up in a war as old as the Bible, being fought on the fresh turf of southern California’s Gold Coast.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Death is pretty much death, bright red and messy and final. The old truths are the deepest and the hardest to learn.

Sometimes it’s tough to survive that kind of knowledge…

Originally published June 1986 in hardcover, July 1987 and March 1993 in paperback and June 2009 in trade paperback.