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Late-seventies Los Angeles was rampant with killers and shady characters, but all the go-getters at Space Matters saw was possibility. Richard Kasparov was handsome and charismatic; his younger associate, Jerry Schneiderman, brilliant and nerdy. When the pair hired a veteran contractor to oversee construction, the space planning firm they operated out of a hip mansion in LA’s Miracle Mile district appeared poised to transform the boundless skyline into their jackpot.

After the promising team imploded, however, the orderly lines on their blueprints succumbed to treachery and secrets. To get even, one of the ex-partners launched a murder-for-profit corporation using, among other peculiar sorts, a bantam-sized epileptic with a deadeye shot and a cross-dressing sidekick. The hapless criminals required a comical number of attempts to execute their first target. Once they did, on a rainy night in the San Fernando Valley, the surviving founder of Space Matters was thrown into a pressure cooker existence out of a Coen Brothers movie. Threatened for money he didn’t have, he donned a disguise, survived a heart-pounding encounter at the La Brea Tar Pits, and relied on an ex-Israeli mercenary for protection. In the end, he had to outfox a glowering murderer, while asking if you can ever really know anyone in a town where dirty deals send men to their graves.

In The Darkest Glare, Chip Jacobs recounts a spectacular, noir-ish, true-crime saga from one of the deadliest eras in American history. You’ll never gaze out windows into the dark again. (Rare Bid Books)

Chip Jacobs is a bestselling author and journalist. His books include the historical fiction & Los Angeles Times bestseller Arroyo, and the biography Strange As It Seems: the Impossible Life of Gordon Zahler. He also co-wrote The People’s Republic of Chemicals, and Smogtown: the Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles with William J. Kelly. He has also contributed pieces to anthologies, among them the bestselling Los Angeles in the 1970s: Weird Scenes Inside the Goldmine and Go Further: Literary Appreciation of Power Pop. On the journalism side, Jacobs’ reporting has been published and aired in the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Daily News, CNN, L.A Weekly, the Southern California News Group, the Pasadena Weekly, and others. For his efforts, he’s won seven Los Angeles Press Club/Southern California Journalism Awards, as well as ones from the California Newspaper Publishers Association, the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies and the Los Angeles Times.Jacobs grew up in northeast Pasadena and  he currently lives in Southern California.

Ron Franscell is a former journalist and the author of 17 books, including the Edgar-nominated Morgue: A Life In Death, international bestseller The Darkest Night, and the true crime Alice & Gerald: A Homicidal Love Story. As a senior writer at the Denver Post, he was dispatched to the Middle East just days after 9/11 to cover the earliest months of the War on Terror. He later covered the devastation of Hurricane Rita from inside the storm. His book reviews and essays have been widely published in many of America’s biggest and best newspapers. He has been a guest on CNN, Fox News, NPR, the Today Show, ABC News, and other major broadcast outlets all over America. And he appears regularly on crime documentaries at Investigation Discovery, History Channel, Reelz, and A&E. He now lives in northern New Mexico.