Most Popular Books by Leslie Evans

Set against the City Of Angels glittering facade, multi-millionaire tabloid publisher, Aaron Rosemont is found dead, brutally murdered with gunshots to the head...A top movie actors image is sabotaged by a smear campaign...False accusations threaten to derail a detectives brilliant career... An ill-fated love affair traps a woman in a web of conspiracy and murder. These are the shocking elements which lead LAPD homicide detectives, Joe Kellermann and Mike Rodriguez, into a labyrinth of greed, infidelity, obsession and murder-for-hire...

Gross ambition...an obsession for money...power...leads to murder and betrayal. On Saturday, September 27, 1969, two LAPD Homicide detectives, Steve Keller and Joe Rodriguez are called to 1025 Sunset Plaza Drive, the sprawling, Spanish style, Hollywood Hills home of tabloid-publisher, Randall Curtiss. Curtiss’ wife, Valerie has been found shot to death in the bathroom of the master bedroom. Curtiss is discovered in the family den, the victim of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. It becomes apparent that Curtiss was beset with heavy financial difficulties, coupled with the fact that his smarmy scandal sheet, Hollywood Confidential, has been hit with a $50-million libel suit. Screen actor, Gregg Chandler was suing Curtiss for defamation of character, invasion of privacy. The stage is set for the murder-suicide. However, following an intense investigation of the crime scene, which includes a ballistics report, and a phony suicide note, the detectives come to the conclusion that the murder-suicide was a “set-up”...that in actuality, the Curtisses were both murdered. Because of Curtiss’ affiliation with the notorious scandal magazine, a host of possible suspects emerges, including his ex-wife, Barbara; his business partner, Diane Walker; a sleazy paparazzi, Tony D’Amato; a competitor, Marty Schwimmer; a disgruntled and recently-fired employee, David Levine; a Mafia-connected hoodlum, Nick DiNapoli. Played against a background, where the Curtiss-Chandler trial is imminent, and surprising testimony from a dying associate of Randall Curtiss surfaces, the detectives’ investigation leads them into an intricate web of blackmail, deception and murder.

The Connecticut town's past gives rise to a book full of "tales of supernatural possibilities . . . as much about history as it is about ghost tales" ( The Day). A hair-raising number of historic haunts—from sea captains who never returned home to servicemen who never left—exist in the half square mile of Groton Bank. Ghostly soldiers of the Revolutionary War roam the Mother Bailey House and march through the basement of a nearby home, and former residents rouse sleepers at the Avery-Copp House. Fort Griswold was the site of a grisly 1781 battle, and phantom footsteps from an unknown entity echo on the first floor of the Ebenezer Avery House. Unseen inhabitants swing open doors at the Submarine Veterans Club, and long-dead guests add unexpected life to the parties at the Fleet Reserve. Join author Hali Keeler and her team as they navigate Groton Bank's paranormal history.

The story of a predatory woman who lures a rogue cop into a complex web of murder and deception. Multi-millionaire, Walter Benedict, CEO of Benedict Enterprises Incorporated, and his wife, Diane are entrapped in a crumbling and untenable marriage. Motivated by greed, and passion for a corrupt L.A. cop, Detective Lt. Jack Ramsey, Mrs. Benedict sets up a plan to “eliminate” her husband. Ramsey enlists the aid of mob-connected Nick Falconetti, who owns the Algiers Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. Acting as a middle-man, Falconetti recommends Tony Lenska, a professional hit-man, to “take care” of Mr. Benedict. Falconetti will take a 33% commission of the $30.000. fee for setting up the dea l. Ramsey meets with Tony Lenska in his squalid, Skid Row hotel room. They arrange to meet a few days later at a yet-undisclosed, Los Angeles location. The story’s sub-plot concerns Diane Benedict’s position as an attorney for the prestigious law firm of David Isreal and Associates, located in Century City. When attorney Mark Zarish is terminated for sexually harassing the new receptionist, Diane is handed the Rick DeMarco case. DeMarco, who is being held at the Men’s Central Jail, without bail, is accused of killing his mistress, Marie Novachek, and throwing her body off the Arroyo Seco Bridge, in nearby Pasadena. To build Lt. Ramsey’s characterization as a vile and totally corrupt cop, he and his partner, Sgt. Becker, are called to a house in Venice, where a middle-aged black woman has been murdered. The prime suspect, her sixteen-year-old son, Sonny, is picked up at a video arcade, taken to police headquarters, and after hours of intense interrogation is coerced into signing a confession. (In actuality, the boy is innocent of the crime.) After returning from a business trip to New York, Walter Benedict retreats to his luxurious boat, the “Santana,” moored in Marina del Rey. It is on board the “Santana” that Lenska plans to “ice” Mr. Benedict. Under cover of darkness, Lenska pours gasoline over the ship’s desk, and sets it on fire. Miraculously, Benedict manages to escape, before the boat blows up. When word reaches Falconetti that Lenska “screwed-up,” he orders two o f his muscle-men to find the hit-man and “eliminate” him. In a suspenseful sequence, Lenska is discovered in a Vegas restaurant Men’s room, kidnapped, and taken to a deserted industrial area, where he is garrotted and killed. His body ends up inside the trunk of a demolished Cadillac, in an Auto-wrecking yard, Ramsey and Diane Benedict meet in an obscure North Hollywood bowling alley and it is here that Ramsey decides to “take out” Benedict himself – he is scheduled to be guest speaker at a Writers convention in Palm Springs. Ramsey vows, Walter Benedict will never “reach” Palm Springs. This scene is followed by a sequence on Interstate 60, a few nights later. Benedict’s Rolls-Royce is pulled over, on a ruse by Det. Ramsey. There is an altercation, and Benedict is shot and killed. His body is taken to a remote desert location and buried. Shortly thereafter, Diane goes to Det. Lt. Joe Kellermann of the Beverly Hills Police Department, to report that her husband is missing. This precipitates an all-out search, and an APB is released by police authorities. The above is interspersed with the murder trial of Rick DeMarco. At one point, he confesses to Mrs. Benedict, that he indeed killed Marie Novacheck because she threatened to scuttle his marriage. When Diane discusses this turn of events with David Isreal, his reaction is: “The guilty deserve representation as well as the innocent. We’ll let the “jury𔄢

An international film star is found brutally murdered in his Hollywood Hills mansion. A secret life of lies, deception and sex-for-hire . . . a shocking confession which turns brother against brother, a juvenile detention facility where hate, racism and violence are submerged in secrecy: These are the electrifying elements that lead two LAPD detectives into a baffling case no witnesses, no suspects. Their only clue is a bloody footprint. Stripping away the City of Angels' glittering facade, the detectives are drawn into a dark web of greed, betrayal, prostitution, and murder.

The story of a woman’s obsession with money...power...prestige; married to a man with a shocking, secret past. Well-known, wealthy novelist, Paul Laszlo is found dead in his luxurious Hollywood Hills mansion, apparently the victim of a suicide. Upon further investigation by LAPD detectives, Joe Mallory and Derek Brooks, the suicide theory is ruled out. A ballistics report indicates Laszlo was murdered; a single gunshot wound to the head. An intense investigation follows, with Diane Laszlo, the victim’s wife, as the prime suspect. The detectives zero-in on Mrs. Laszlo primarily because her first husband died in a mysterious boating accident, leaving her with an insurance settlement of $500,000. In a divorce settlement with her second husband, Diane gained custody of their teen-aged son and a lump sum of $200,000. Further probing into her background, reveals that Mrs. Laszlo was manipulative, a gross opportunist, a woman who would stop at nothing to get what she wants. With greed as her motive, Mallory suspects Diane may have been involved in Laszlo’s death, but the detectives don’t have a shred of evidence to arrest her. The story’s subplot involves the murder of a black prostitute at a Sunset Boulevard motel. This is followed by a raid on an East L.A. apartment where the suspect, Juan Comacho manages to elude the police. Later, Comacho is arrested in a Spanish Harlem bar and extradited back to California by NYPD Det. Brad Shaner. It is here that the two plots intersect. Offering a fresh look, a new perspective on the Laszlo murder, Shaner joins Mallory in reviewing the case file. Viewing autopsy photos, Shaner recognizes Laszlo from a sexual assault arrest made in New York, almost twenty-eight years before. At that time he was known as Paul Barac. As the climax approaches, Mark, Laszlo’s stepson is interrogated. In a tearful confession (told in flashback) the sixteen-year-old boy relates a year of sexual molestation by Laszlo, ending in Mark’s desperate attempt to end it all...by killing his stepfather.

The story begins when prominent Beverly Hills psychiatrist, Dr. Joel Steiner, is shot and killed by an unknown intruder, on Steiner’s luxury yacht, the Sirocco. LAPD Det. Joe Kellermann and his partner, Det. Rick Ramirez, begin an immediate investigation into Dr. Steiner’s murder. Supposedly, “happily married,” the detectives soon learn Steiner was having a secret affair with one of his patients: a mystery-woman, know only as “Rita.” Upon further investigation, the mistress Rita Chandler, is found living in a beach-front bungalow on P.C.H. in Malibu. During the interrogation, Miss Chandler reveals that her affair with Steiner had become the ultimate fatal attraction. He was totally obsessed with her. When she tells him the affair is over, primarily because she has fallen in love with another man, Steve Ryan, he loses it; in a fit of rage he tells her: “If I can’t have you...nobody else will!” Steiner even threatens to kill her. A scene with Steve Ryan reaffirms Miss Chandler’s testimony that after the break-up, Steiner constantly spied on her, stalked her, made obscene phone calls, etc., finally forcing her to leave her Santa Barbara apartment. At the end of this scene, we are shocked, when Ryan reveals that Rita Chandler is HIV-positive. She has AIDS. In a scene, following, Kellermann’s superior officer, Capt. Frank McElroy, already has a list of four possible suspects: Rita Chandler, her boyfriend, Barbara Steiner, the “grieving widow,” and Steiner’s business partner, Dr. Sydney Zellman. This scene ends with a surprise visit from Diana Marlowe, from the Santa Barbara District Attorney’s office. She is here to see Kellermann with vital information concerning the Steiner case. Miss Marlowe reveals that about three months prior, Rita Chandler came into her Santa Barbara office and filed a complaint against Steiner. As incredible as it sounded, Miss Chandler was positive, Steiner had injected her with the deadly AIDS virus. Pregnant (with Steiner’s child) she had an abortion. Upon further investigation, the D.A.’s office learned that Steiner was treating three AIDS patients, including a gay man, named Larry Mosely. Genetic analysis of the virus that infected Miss Chandler, was shown to be identical to Mosely’s. Dr. Steiner was arrested, arraigned and released on $200,000 bond. His trial was scheduled to begin in a matter of weeks. Miss Marlowe explains, word “leaked out” of the D.A.’s office; Mosely’s gay and HIV status became public. He was suing Steiner for doctor-patient confidentiality. Kellermann immediately adds Larry Mosely to his possible-suspect list. Within 48 hours later, Kellermann is informed by Beverly Hills detective Gregg Juarez, that Diana Marlowe has been reported missing. She walked out of her hotel and hasn’t been seen since. This is followed by a $50,000 ransom hoax, perpetrated by an ex-con, Marlowe had “sent-up.” A sequence of events follows, wherein the detectives try to “flush out,” Larry Mosely. They learn that Mosely is “holed-up” in an L.A. Skid Row hotel. In the interrogation scene that follows, we see that Larry Mosely is dying. As the detectives wait for the hotel elevator to take them back to the first floor lobby, they suddenly hear a single gunshot from Mosely’s room. They discover he has committed suicide. Ten days after her disappearance, Diana Marlowe’s body is discovered in an Echo Park self storage locker; a single bullet wound to the chest. A ballistics report states that the weapon Mosely used to kill himself with, was the same one used to murder Miss Marlowe. The big break in the case comes when Bill Bradshaw, with the Los Angeles D.A.’s office contacts Kellermann. He states that a man, Tony Lesniak, being held prisoner a the Men’s Central Jail, has vital and important information concerning Dr. Steiner’s murder. For that information, Lesniak wants the D.A.’s office to cut him a deal. Lesniak states emphatically that on two separate occasion

Los Angeles Police Department homicide detectives, Joe Kellermann and his partner, Mike Rodriguez, are drawn into a baffling case, when top Hollywood television producer, Jonathan Barry vanishes without a trace. As the story unfolds, the detectives soon become enmeshed in a web of lust, passion, betrayal and murder-for-hire. Evidence soon leads to nightclub owner, Tony Caruso, who is the alleged connection between the two hired killers and Barrys wife, Diane. Police are shocked when Caruso himself is found dead in his Hollywood Hills home. Was it suicide or homicide? This is a story of violence, blackmail and murder. A taut, fast-moving tale that probes the sordid and seamy comers of the City of Angels--a city on the dark side of the sun.

Janis Leslie Evans is a graduate of Howard University where she earned a master's degree in counseling psychology from the School of Education. She received her bachelor's degree in psychology from Buffalo State University in her hometown of Buffalo, New York. As a licensed professional counselor and founder of Evans Counseling & Consultation, PLLC, her career spans over 30 years in mental health. As a debut author, Janis wrote her first book, Recollections About Race: Getting to the Roots and Healing, self-published in November 2021. Emotionally gutted by a flood of memories after witnessing the video of the brutal murder of George Floyd, Janis wrote about events she experienced over her lifetime. The events she details are common and relatable to African Americans, particularly Black women, who were triggered by the cumulative effects of witnessing the racial upheaval and protests of the summer of 2020. Recollections About Race served as a springboard for her second book, which illuminates her love of poetry. She illustrates in poetic form the common experiences of a Black community living everyday life in America. Poetically Black: Reflections on African American Joy, Sorrow, and Healing, tells the stories of a people who have struggled to survive and heal amidst the impacts of racial trauma. Janis composed most of these poems between 2006 and 2023.

This second volume of Leslie Evans' Shaggy Man essays offers fifteen new selections. “On the Track of the Elusive Baron Long” offers the only extensive biographical sketch of one of Southern California's most fascinating characters, creator in the little industrial city of Vernon, California, what is reputed to have been the first real night club in America. Long later hired a nineteen-year-old high school dropout to design the most exquisite and expensive hotel and casino in the Western Hemisphere. Two pieces look at Peak Oil, challenging today's hype that fracked oil in North Dakota and Texas will solve America's energy problems.“Symptoms of U.S. Decline” presents statistics that show the United States has fallen far behind all the other advanced countries and even many from the third world on a wide range of indices from education to infrastructure, poverty, homelessness, healthcare, upward mobility, economic inequality, and prison populations.“The Strange Case of Ahmad Kamal” tells how the CIA in the 1950s foolishly introduced the Muslim Brotherhood into Europe in hopes it would win over Soviet Muslims, as well as the story of the American adventurer Cimarron Hathaway, who, under the pseudonym of Ahmad Kamal, devoted his life to fighting for the independence of the Muslim peoples of Turkestan.“The Left and the Jews,” traces the attitude of the Marxist and anarchist left toward the Jews. Originally antisemitic, the socialist and Marxist Left came to welcome assimilationist Jews, while remaining hostile to Jewish national aspirations, calling on the Jews to disappear as an identifiable people.“Why the Middle East Is Always in Crisis” traces the fatal decisions of the Western Powers at the end of World War I to create states in the former Ottoman Empire that threw together peoples with profound religious and ethnic hostilities, making the Middle East a region of perpetual violent turmoil.“Bygone Days in West Adams” looks at some of the people and their homes in this once vaunted community on the edge of Downtown Los Angeles, from the days when a former gunslinger and singing waiter could become the richest man in America and an Italian immigrant farm worker could found the largest winery in the country.“The Hunger Ahead” looks at the end of the Green Revolution as population continues its geometric growth, while arable land erodes, aquifers are drained, and global warming increasingly imperils food supplies. Others look at the modern dictators and their opponents, the rightward evolution of the Republican Party, recent discoveries about the ancient religion known as Gnosticism, and L. Frank Baum's Oz books.

Here from The Shaggy Man's Place (www.shaggyman.com), everything from ecological crises and religious wars to Edwardian authors, the scandal plagued city of Vernon, early computer games, and local Los Angeles history. International oil production has been frozen since 2005 while demand from our 7 billion and growing global population continues upward, forcing prices of oil, gasoline, and food ever higher. Our political leaders stake our future on a strategy of economic growth just as the planet is hitting its physical limits on nonrenewable resources, from oil to farmland to potable water. Here is a close look at what we really are up against - along with a review of the really bad experience with the Marxist alternative system. Since the Enlightenment we have expected religion to fade away. Instead it has become central to the identity of millions, from the Christian Right to Jihadi Islam, with ominous consequences. The media treats each outbreak of violence by jihadi militants as a separate event. They are also part of a global Islamic awakening that began after World War II and aspires to world hegemony for Islam, as Christianity once did a thousand years ago. Here is a look at the aims of the most famous of the jihadi theorists, Egyptian martyr Sayyid Qutb, a survey of Islamic battles on a world scale, and a critique of those who underestimate this foe. And on a lighter note, pieces on an odd leftist bookstore in Missoula, Montana, called Freddy's Feed and Read, fabulist author Lord Dunsany, George Bernard Shaw, western lawman Wyatt Earp, a Romanian novelist who challenged Ceausescu and survived him, socialist millionaire John Randolph Haynes who gave California the ballot box initiative system that has become so troublesome today, and Doctor Margaret "Mom" Chung, daughter of a prostitute, who took out Mary Pickford's tonsils and adopted 1500 U.S. airmen and submariners in World War II into her club, called The Fair-Haired Bastards. Leslie Evans, author of Outsider's Reverie and proprietor of The Shaggy Man's Place website, is a former Trotskyist, one-time iron miner, erstwhile editor for UCLA's Asian Studies centers, the World Bank and the World Health Organization, and activist in Los Angeles' historic inner city West Adams neighborhood. The Shaggy Man, a wanderer from Kansas, is a character in the Oz books by L. Frank Baum.

Little Owl travels around Farmer Jim's animal ranch asking her friends for help to answer her mom's question, "Do you know who loves you?" Even though all her friends already know who loves her, they want her to learn for herself. Each of them gives her a clue to solve the mystery. Read along to see if you can figure out who loves Little Owl before Little Owl does.--Publisher.

Second edition, November 2019An ever surprising account of a life on the spiritual and political margins. Leslie Evans' parents were occultists, downwardly mobile outcasts from their families, one Christian, the other Jewish. His father, a failed salesman reminiscent of Willie Loman, had also been a professional astrologer who was forever on the lookout for quick roads to enlightenment or a deal that would make him rich, including buying a gold mine in the Arizona mountains. Evans childhood in the late 1940s and early 1950s was filled with accounts of the astral plane and of Father Randall, the dead thirteenth century crusader and spirit guide who had been a major figure in his parent's lives.As a teenager under the influence of Colin Wilson's The Outsider Evans set out on a mystic quest, experimented with Peyote, and frequented the Beat coffee houses. In college he formed a student political party with his friend the black nationalist ideologue Ron Karenga, who would later create the holiday Kwanzaa. Following the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961 Evans was persuaded by two Jewish refugees from the Nazis to join the Socialist Workers Party, the American followers of the murdered Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky. Over two decades in that organization he rose to become the managing editor of the Trotskyist Fourth International's English language news service, was editor of the party's theoretical magazine, and coeditor of the definitive edition of Trotsky's writings on China, during which time he became friends with Peng Shu-tse, who had been a central leader of the Chinese Communist Party in the 1920s.In the 1960s the SWP masterminded anti-Vietnam War demonstrations that brought more protesters to Washington, D.C., than the entire city population. Evans chronicles the party's growth in the mass antiwar movement, then, as the radical wave receded, the party's turn to industrial work during which Evans spent three years on the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota, two of them working as a hard rock miner. Then came the organization's implosion in the early 1980s when younger party leaders turned on the old guard and staked their future on an unsuccessful effort to win influence with Fidel Castro. Evans was close enough to the center of these events to tell much about the inner life of this American Marxist party that the true believers would not tell and that few of the former members were high enough in the organization to witness directly. He goes on to describe his painful rethinking of Marxism. In later years Evans was a researcher at UCLA where he put his training in Chinese to use by heading an Asian book publishing project. He served for two years as production editor of a major report for the World Health Organization documenting the failure to invest in research on the diseases that ravage the third world, and worked as a web journalist for UCLA's International Institute where he covered talks by Mikhail Gorbachev and many other international political figures. He also took time to explore the paranormal world that had so fascinated his parents. In recent years he has been a community activist on the mean streets of South Los Angeles. This second edition, 10 years after first publication, makes numerous small updates and additions in the text and adds a postscript.