Some stories could only take place in L.A., a place referred to by Robert Eversz as a “city of unbearable beauty and dread.” Digging James Dean, the latest novel featuring the exploits of Nina Zero, parolee and paparazzi, hot on the trail of another scoop for everybody’s favorite tabloid, Scandal Times, is just such a story. This time around, Nina is after a shadowy group responsible for stealing the bones of long dead celebrities such as James Dean and Rudolph Valentino. Even after befriending a teenage runaway and erstwhile member of that nefarious organization, Nina is not sure quite what their agenda is. Are they merely harmless weirdoes interested in cloning their heroes from the aforementioned stolen body parts? Or are they somehow involved in a world-wide trade of celebrity remains, much like the traffic in religious artifacts that took place during the middle ages? Whatever the self-proclaimed “Church of the Divine Thespians” is up to, it’s far more sinister than even Nina suspects. First, the photographer’s long-lost sister is found dead at the base of a set of steps leading to a mausoleum in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. It’s only after Nina has to rescue the niece she never even knew she had from the clutches of a maniac who claims to be both a descendant of Aleister Crowley and a devotee of L. Ron Hubbard that she begins to see things for what they are. Not even the most lurid tabloid speculation can match what she and her toothless Rottweiler are really up against.

Some readers will be disappointed by the plot of this novel. It is convoluted and, in places, wanders (literally) all over the Hollywood Hills without ever really going anywhere. What drives this story, and what ultimately redeems it, are the characters. The bit players are fascinating and quirky – from the aging paparazzi, “Vulch,” Nina’s sidekick and\Scandal Times editor Frank Adams, to the ever-smarmy but fading action star, Chad Stonewall. And, of course, there’s Nina herself, born Mary Alice Baker, and truly a “tragically hip” antihero for the new millennium. A convicted murderess, world-weary at the age of thirty, and the product of an abusive and dysfunctional family that makes the Manson clan seem like the Waltons, Nina’s essential goodness and sense of fair play nevertheless still shine through her desperation and her hard-as-nails façade. She carries a crowbar looped through her belt and keeps a back-up camera tucked down her boot. But she also spends her last dime buying a sack of burgers to feed both her dog and a young girl living “rough” on the ole’ boulevard of broken dreams … a street with which Nina is herself well acquainted.

Perhaps even more remarkable than the characters is Eversz’s prose. Direct as a knee to the groin and beautifully poetic in turn, there are passages in this book that will set your nerves on edge and others that will leave you nearly breathless with their lyrical power. Consider, for example, Nina’s description of the lights of L.A. as she sits on stakeout in the darkness beside Griffith Park Observatory above the city:

Viewed from above the lights cascade down the hills like froth on the curl of a wave breaking upon a long, flat sheen of sand; streetlamps, arc lights, flashing and static neon signs, fluorescent office and incandescent house lights, and everywhere at every hour of night the bright heads and red tails of automobiles flowing through the freeways and surface streets like tropical fish in an aquarium of lights. Whenever the city irritates me I climb the hills and fall in love again.”

If Chandler was, in one memorable description, “a slumming angel … [investing] the sun blinded streets of Los Angeles with a romantic presence,” what do passages like this make Eversz?

It’s also worth noting that much of what goes on in Digging James Dean presupposes some knowledge of the events in the previous novels in this series. That being said, the author does a fair job of bringing even absolute newcomers up to speed. The bottom line is that fans of the series will be able to jump right into this book. Others will have to work a little harder to get acclimated but should have things sorted out sufficiently thirty or forty pages into the text.

Digging James Dean is an offbeat and outrageous novel. It’s just the kind of thing that Nina Zero fans have come to love and expect from the gifted but twisted imagination of Robert Eversz. The thing is it’s also a novel about hope, about overcoming despair and about redemption. Although not without its problems, you’ll have to go lot farther and fair a lot worse before you find another book that puts such a serious message in such a stylish, madcap and entertaining package. As the saying goes, only in L.A.