Sean Carswell, "DEAD EXTRA" w/ Steph Cha

The early forties have been a tough time for Jack Chesley. His plane was shot down over Germany and he spent two years in a brutal POW camp. During that time, his wife fell in the tub and died.

Prior to her death, the early forties were even tougher for Jack’s wife, Wilma. After Jack was mistakenly presumed dead, she went on a bender that ended with her wrongful commitment to the Camarillo State Psychiatric Hospital. While there, she took up with an alcoholic socialite, a junkie pianist, and a shady hospital employee who promised her a way out. Only that way out set her on the path to the end of her road.

Now Jack’s back in Los Angeles. His sister-in-law and Wilma’s twin, Gertie, hunts him down to tell him Wilma’s death was no accident: she was murdered. Gertie’s first efforts to find the truth earned her a bullet to the collarbone. But that doesn’t mean Gertie is ready to give up. She knows the right places to look and the right people to ask. She needs Jack, who was a cop for a short time before the war, to stick his nose into these places and ask these questions so that, together, they can figure out who killed Wilma, and why.

Dead Extra follows the parallel storylines of Wilma in the months before her murder in 1944 and Jack and Gertie’s search for the killer in 1946. Their adventures carry them through Hollywood’s second-tier studios, the Camarillo psychiatric hospital, Pasadena mansions, downtown jazz clubs, and one seriously sleazy motor court in Oxnard.

Author Sean Carswell is in conversation with Steph Cha,  author of Follow Her Home, Beware Beware, and Dead Soon Enough.