A Shooting Star

About the Book

Johnny Daimler, James Phelps, Paul Winston, Stan Winston, and Garrett B. Smith. Meet the five men behind one of America’s most successful Alternative Rock bands: True Lies.

Enter Phillip James Banks, a brilliant 48-year-old musical act promoter for Left Field Management Services. P. J. Banks has a real knack for picking some of the best, hottest musical acts around to promote. But P. J. Banks has a lot of personal demons to exercise: ranging from a failed marriage of twenty-three years, to a romantic fling with an Englishwoman half his age, to memories of the Vietnam War: a brother killed in Laos, Cambodia, and an Asian woman with a child Phillip Banks left behind somewhere in the jungles of Southeast Asia.

Meet Johnny Daimler the movie star, appearing in his first starring role as a British Army officer in the World War II drama, “Clapper North,” directed  by Thaddeus Pickering, a top Hollywood director at the newly-established West Coast Films.

Watch as Johnny and his four talented band members rise from poverty and a life working in the steel mills and construction sites of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and go on to receive national stardom, brutalizing press scrutiny, and international acclaim. Watch as the band records a classic remake of Joan Baez’s “Diamonds and Rust.”  Watch as the band tours the former Soviet Republics of Russia. But Johnny Daimler struggles with a few demons of his own: he battles alcoholism and prescription drug addiction. In the meantime, True Lies’ songs continue to climb the charts, and Johnny lives life full-speed-ahead, in the fast lane. For he’s a shooting star whose flame finally flickers and burns itself out, for Johnny dies at the story’s end.

About the Author

Upon graduating from the prestigious Long Ridge Writers Group in March of 1999, I set about to writing two novels. The first, New Horizons, is a science fiction story that takes place in the universe of the early 21st Century. It was published by the Internet publisher 1st Books Library. My second novel, A Shooting Star, takes a more down to Earth approach. It is a story about a fictional Alternative Rock band called True Lies. The novel contains a number of songs and poems which I, the author, actually wrote myself. It is my personal opinion that the eight songs and the one poem serve as the glue to hold the entire story together. After all, when you’ve got people inside a recording studio, they can’t just stand idle, with their hands in their pockets. They’ve got to have something to sing.