JANYCE STEFAN-COLE
HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD
Ardennes Thrush is an award-winning movie star who suddenly and mysteriously quit acting at the height of her fame. She is in Hollywood now, at the Hotel Muse, visiting her husband Andre, a world-renowned director struggling through his latest film. Ardennes, a contemplative woman, is also something of a voyeur, and as she watches the comings and goings in the hotel she begins to fear that perhaps she is being stalked. Her period of anonymity ends after a box of dead roses is delivered to her suite. When a Beverly Hills detective comes to investigate, a powerful attraction turns unexpectedly unprofessional and quickly carnal.
When the stalker turns out to be real, Ardennes’s private journey escalates into real danger, and we watch rapt as she searches her past for the answer to how she brought herself here.
At once a noir novel and a psychological thriller, Hollywood Boulevard is the track of a very real emotional journey. With a deceptively simple style, the novel takes a compassionate look at a complicated character readers won’t be able to let go without regret.
$25.95 / $26.95 CAN | Fiction Hardcover | 6x9 | 368 pages
April 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60953-075-4 | Carton Quantity: 24
EISBN: 978-1-60953-076-1
See a Video Excerpt produced by RedCube pictures
The Hotel Muse is old by Hollywood measure, a nightclub originally, from the late forties, featuring acts better suited to a circus sideshow. The hotel was added later. Half way up the hill is the upper part where we are situated—modest cousin to the main hotel on the avenue. It’s the director’s whim that his wife and principal crew (mostly imports from the east coast) are installed up top, forming a kind of colony. Andre likes the availability of his people grouped together, but there are fewer amenities up top ... The lobby is small so most mornings internet users from uphill gather around the pool, rain or shine, chill or warm, huddling under patio umbrellas. I’ve noticed a number of German film types at breakfast.
They talked loudly on Skype as they pace, necks swathed in scarves, woolen caps pulled low. Andre’s quirks usually pay off. I like his crew, and the arty types up here, for once inheriting the earth—or the spectacular view, anyhow.
Our outsized, east-facing balcony overlooks a coral tree where wild green parrots squawk and screech each morning among the bright red flower petals. The landscape reminds me of the south of France, houses and villas tumbling steeply down the hills in a hodgepodge of styles, an architectural balancing act. The view to the right veers neurotically into L.A.’s urban sprawl and the sudden verticality of downtown. Straight ahead I can see the gray dome of the Griffith Observatory. On mornings when fog or the yellow brown curtain of smog lifts, the San Gabriel Mountains are visible, snow-capped and reassuring in the distance. Brown dotted hills segue into mountains in snow: urban and wild in the same snapshot. I hear there are lions in those mountains. I look out each day and imagine the city living on borrowed time, that the earth under Hollywood will someday shift and shrug houses and people, the observatory, trees, birds, coyote, squirrels, cats, snakes and everyone’s dreams off the hills into the yawning abyss.
Janyce Stefan-Cole writes fiction, essay and freelance journalism. A finalist for the James Jones First Novel Fellowship, she is included in the Boston Globe bestselling anthology, Dick for a Day (Villard Books), The Healing Muse and Knock Literary Arts Magazine; a story will be published, January, 2012, in the Editions Bibliotekos anthology, Being Human: The Call of the Wild. A fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, she attended the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, and resides with her husband in Brooklyn, NY, and Freedom, NH.
Author photo by Scott Neary.
