Tom Ardies was a reporter and columnist for the Vancouver Sun during the 1960’s, a thriller novelist in the 1970s & 80s, and an acclaimed crime writer (under the pseudonym “Jack Trolley”) in the 1990s. His spy novel Kosygin Is Coming was adapted into the movie called Russian Roulette starring George Segal and Denholm Elliott. He died in 2020 at the age of 89.
Greg Meister was a farm boy who went off to war…and when he came back, everything was different. He meets Tandy Crain, a rich girl gone bad, in a Harlem jazz club, and falls in love. Together, they build a family and an empire, their lives dangerously entwined with music, the stock market and a ruthless mobster named Al Capone. It was a love built on dreams in a country built on promise. But when that promise is violently broken, Greg and Tandy must fight for their family’s survival in a brutal new country.
Adventurers, dreamers, thieves and kings: sooner or later all of them come to Palm Springs, the most lavish, sensual playground on earth. But for the six strangers who arrive in a limousine from the Beverly Wilshire hotel, it’s many things: an erotic utopia waiting to be physically conquered, a final chance a redemption, a fresh start, and a shot at winning a billion-dollar prize: developing a patch of dry sand into a new, exclusive community for the mega-rich.