Evan Horne
3 total works
Jazz pianist Evan Horne, settled into the San Francisco jazz scene, takes a gig in Los Angeles, where he's offered his most unusual job yet. Mega movie star Ryan Stiles hires Evan to teach him to look like he's playing piano for an upcoming film role. Evan stays at Stiles' lush Malibu home for the tutoring, but suddenly Stiles' adversarial relationship with the paparazzi explodes when a photographer is killed. Was it an accident or is Stiles a suspect? Evan wants out, but Stiles' manager dangles the opportunity for Evan to score the film if he stays. Then when the film begins, another mysterious death occurs, and somebody begins to blackmail the star. With help of the FBI's Andie Lawrence and the LAPD's Lt. Danny Cooper, Evan launches his own investigation. Then Evan's old nemesis, serial killer Gillian Sims, escapes from prison....
Evan Horne, recovering from both the injury to his hand and to his psyche, is on tour in England, hoping to concentrate on music and not on crime. But his old friend, Ace Buffington, who's led him into trouble before, shows up with a contract to write a biography of legendary trumpeter Chet Baker. Baker died of a fall from the window of his hotel in Amsterdam in 1988. Whether he accidentally fell, or was pushed is one of the mysteries of the jazz world. Evan resists this adventure until Ace turns up missing and leaves him no choice. To find Ace, he will have to dig into the mysterious death of Chet Baker.
After several months of successful work in London and Amsterdam with American expatriate Fletcher Paige, musician Evan Horne returns to the states and settles in the San Francisco Bay Area. There he reunites with his girlfriend, FBI agent, Andie Lawrence. And Evan quickly makes inroads into the Bay Area jazz scene.
Life is good until a phone call from a Los Angeles attorney turns his life upside down. Evan's old friend and former mentor, pianist Calvin Hughes, has died and named Evan as his sole beneficiary. Hughes has left him his small Hollywood house, money, and all of his possessions. But when Evan begins to play through some hand-written sheet music, he recognizes one as a song from the landmark Miles Davis recording Birth of the Cool, and another from Kind of Blue.
Evan is soon on a whirlwind journey across the country to find answers from his family and to confront his mother. Was Calvin Hughes the uncredited composer of one or both of these tunes, or was it simply Hughes' transcriptions from the recordings? What was her relationship with Calvin Hughes? And just how did Jazz come into the equation?