Patty Dallas lies dead on a Santa Barbara dock, her party dress hiked up around her hips. Her body wrapped in seaweed, the target of hungry seagulls and sand flies. Private detective Matt Jagger, a disgraced and cashiered Los Angeles cop, pulls her dress back down with the hook which now replaces a bullet-riddled left hand. It's the frenzied 1930's, where anything and everything can happen. Hollywood parties and passions run wild, extravagant weekends and gambling ships are the rage, and there's a growing force of bad cops who willingly do much of the dirty work and clean-up for the Mafia in Southern California. The corpse Jagger's identifying is his ex-wife, and he knows he's next...on the hit list of the Los Angeles mob and that city's corrupt police force for uncovering an extortion plot and murder by fellow officers. But there's a newer, bigger crime in progress...one to take over the entire motion picture industry...and killing Jagger has become part of the bad guys plan to win it all! "Dead Eyes" and successive novels in Matt Jagger series are written and illustrated much in the style and form of the pulp fiction stories of the 1930's, 1940's and 1950's, when hundreds of pulp titles dominated the adult hard-core reading market in America, written by famed authors including Raymond Chandler, Walt Coburn, Louis Lamour, Ray Bradbury, Tennessee Williams, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dashiell Hammett, Paul Gallico, and Max Brand.
About the Author: Gordon R. Ross has been writing published fiction and non-fiction for over half a century, first as a wire service reporter and correspondent, newspaper journalist, editorial writer and later as an advertising copywriter and illustrator for newspapers and magazines. With assignments all over the West and Midwest, from big cities to rural settings, his experiences have led to a creative career in semi-retirement as a successful fiction writer of short stories, plays, and novels. Of particular interest to Ross are the turbulent years preceding and during World War II, when America and its citizens were just beginning to shake off the depression and discover their country's possibilities...both good and bad. The fictional heroes and heroines in his works are a rousing mix of human qualities, needs and flaws. Some of his villains and supporting cast are based on real people of the period as well as actual events. Matching the literary pulp fiction tone of the 1930's, Ross writes in tough first-person prose of good guys bending the law but with honorable intentions, fighting morally base, corrupt villains with evil premeditation and holding the upper hand while no quarter is given by either side. The third edition of "Dead Eyes," first novel in the Matt Jagger, P.I. Series, "Three Times Dead," is available on Amazon in print, as a download on line, and from Kindle books. Books 2 and 3, "Dead Silence" and "Dead Certain," also in their third edition, are likewise available from Amazon and Kindle. Plus: Finding a home at Amazon and Kindle Books is "Tales from Tidy Vale," a collection of graveyard short stories by Gordon R. Ross. Twelve different parables of people who should have known better... before it was too late.