On Saturday, January 25, from 1-3 p.m., the Muzeo’s complimentary Open Book Authors’ Series returns. Award-winning international author Stephen Maitland-Lewis and Southern Californian Steven Deeble will be the featured authors. Maitland-Lewis will discuss his current book, “Ambition,” and Deeble, his “Persistence of Vision.” The moderator will be John Brantingham, Inaugural Poet Laureate of Sequoia and King Canyon National Park.
Maitland-Lewis in his latest book “Ambition” underscores that having it all will never be enough for George Tazoli, an ambitious dealer on the trading floor of a prominent California bank. He is hand-picked for a special assignment to sell off bad loans, but not because he is dating the daughter of the bank’s president, rather for his skill at working the market. The promotion sends him to New York, putting a strain on his relationship, but then a scandalous discovery lures him into the gamble of a lifetime. George must gauge the risks—his direct superior is the bank’s president and his potential father-in-law, who is married to an heiress worth billions, all the more reason for George to vow his fidelity. Back at the bank’s headquarters, the president and his father, the chairman and grandfather of George’s L.A. girlfriend, are embroiled in a long-standing feud with another family of stockholders competing for control of the bank. The boardroom tension and ultimate showdown keeps everyone busy while George makes difficult choices that will teach him a lesson learned the hard way—even wealth has a price. Maitland-Lewis is a jazz aficionado and a Board Trustee of the Louis Armstrong House Museum in New York. In 2014, he received the museum’s prestigious Louie Award. A member of PEN, the Palm Springs Writer’s Guild and the Author’s Guild, Maitland-Lewis is also on the Executive Committee of the International Mystery Writers Festival. In addition, he is on the Advisory Board of the California Jazz Foundation and is a former Board member. His novel “Hero on Three Continents” has received numerous accolades, and “Emeralds Never Face” won the 2012 Benjamin Franklin Award for Historical Fiction and the 2011 Written Arts Award for Best Fiction. His novel “Ambition” was a 2013 USA Best Book Awards finalist and won first place for General Fiction in the 2013 Rebecca’s Reads Choice Awards. Maitland-Lewis’ most recent novel “Botticelli’s Bastard” was a 2014 USA Best Book Awards finalist in three categories and won the Bronze Award in Best Regional Fiction (Europe) at the 2015 Independent Publisher Book Awards. In January of 2016, Maitland-Lewis was sworn in as a Freeman of the City of London and admitted as a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of City Solicitors. In April of 2016, he became a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He and his wife, Joni Barry, are sponsors and supporters of the annual Satchmo Summer Fest in New Orleans.
Long Beach author Steven Deeble’s book “Persistence of Vision” is a historical detective thriller that takes place across Southern California in 1929. On Memorial Day of that year, Detective Daniel Moretti has reached the end of the road. His past is catching up with him as he investigates the case of his career. A private investigator is found dead at the Palm Springs home of a Hollywood starlet. Moretti’s investigation takes him from the desert to the sea, from the hotels and the heat of Palm Springs and the Mojave Desert, to the cool ocean breezes of Culver City, Hollywood, Bel Air and Long Beach. Along the way he crosses paths with the Hollywood elite—Chaplin, Barrymore, Stan Laurel, Lon Chaney. And then there’s the starlet in whose home the PI died. Moretti has met her before, and she starts the skeletons in his closet rattling. He barely made it to California after their encounter. Now could she be trying to kill him to cover it up and protect her fledgling career? Is Moretti one step behind the killer, or ahead? People around him keep showing up dead, and the local cops are as crooked as the branches of a Joshua Tree. Moretti has precious few friends he can trust, although another woman from his past gives him hope. People struggle to get to L.A., thinking it’s like the movies. Hollywood was a real estate deal, but people come from all over the world to make their fortunes. Some succeed. Most end up waiting tables or driving trucks. L.A. isn’t the dream…it’s the waking up. “Persistence of Vision” is a taut noir thriller in the manner of Hammett, Chandler and Ellroy. Its characters and locales are vividly drawn, and colorfully portray a time of great style and elegance.
Moderator John Brantingham teaches composition and creative writing at Mt. San Antonio College in Walnut. He has had hundreds of poems and stories published in the United States and the United Kingdom in magazines such as Tears in the Fence, Pearl, Confrontation and The Journal. He spent the 2015-2019 summers living off the grid in a tent in the High Sierra, teaching poetry and writing for Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. He is the first poet laureate of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, and his work has been featured in hundreds of magazines and in Writer’s Almanac and The Best Small Fictions 2016. He is the author of hundreds of poems, stories and essays published in magazines in the United States and United Kingdom. His books include Mann of War, a crime novel; Let Us All Pray Now to Our Own Strange Gods, a short story collection; The Gift of Form, an instruction guide for beginning formal poetry; and East of Los Angeles, a poetry collection.
This presentation is free to the public but RSVPs to clatham@muzeo.org are encouraged.
Parking is provided beyond the second level gate in CtrCity Parking Lot 5—immediately off Center Street Promenade and Anaheim Boulevard. Muzeo will validate this parking.
