THRILLER:  Twenty-five-year-old journalist Adam Murphy is chasing a career-making story when he is abruptly fired by the magazine that employs him. Scarred by the failure of a recent relationship. Adam finds himself cut adrift in the city of West Hollywood, when he meets mystery novelist James Wilton, a man whose own life has been marked by bestsellerdom, fame, and attempted murder.


Within days of joining Wilton’s personal staff, Adam learns that his former lover has vanished without a trace, and that his disappearance matches several other recent missing persons cases. Adam and Wilton begin to suspect a serial killer is preying upon the city’s young gay men and decide to investigate.


But the truth is being guarded by a diabolical force that neither man could have imagined, and they explore paths of vengeance, murder, and sexual perversion from the mansion-strung Hollywood Hills to the drug-ravaged plains of California’s Central Valley. It is an investigation that will threaten not only their unlikely friendship, but their lives.


Light Before Day is a riveting and complex mystery set against the gothic twenty-first century landscape that Rice has made his own.