Thriller set in Los Angeles and Las Vegas – plus talking location with Rod Reynolds

10th July 2018

Cold Desert Sky by Rod Reynolds, thriller set in Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

Rod’s first two novels in his Charlie Yates thriller series (The Dark Inside and Black Night Falling) were set in Texarkana and Hot Springs – close to the border between Texas and Arkansas. In Cold Desert Sky he moves to Los Angeles and Las Vegas – with his now wife Lizzie, the sister of one of the girls murdered in Texarkana in The Dark Inside.

They set out to find the whereabouts of two girls who have disappeared in Los Angeles. Their investigation takes them to the ‘casting couch’ of a studio, to a club owned by Benjamin Siegel, a mobster (who, incidentally, has a vendetta against Charlie), and on to Las Vegas where Benjamin is building a massive out of town casino… but has run into financial difficulties.  The story is exciting, violent, breath taking, and fast moving. It involves both the FBI and the local Las Vegas police – sometimes helping the investigation, and sometimes hindering it. Who is covering for who? Who is weaving webs?

Cold Desert Sky is an all American thriller – and yet Rod is a Brit. He is one of a series of British writers (Cal Moriarty and Steph Broadribb are others…) who have taken to this genre and made it their own.

Cold Desert Sky is an excellent read.

Tony for the TripFiction team

#TalkingLocationWith…  Rod Reynolds in Las Vegas

Taking my daughter to recreate my first taste of Las Vegas. She wasn’t as impressed.

My first experience of Las Vegas was waking up in the back of a car and staring up at the sheer side of a black pyramid that stretched into the sky as far as I could see.

This was 1999 and I was on a road trip around the south-western US; I’d fallen asleep somewhere in the Nevada desert, not having seen anything bigger than a cactus for hours. Now I was looking at this thing and I couldn’t comprehend the scale.

Scale. That was the word I kept coming back to when I tried to explain later why I was so captivated by Vegas.

Of course I was familiar with the place from seeing it on the TV and in movies, but I’d never been especially interested in going there. I wasn’t a gambler, I wasn’t old enough to drink there (legally…), and as a kid from London, from a distance it all looked a bit corny.

Then you actually go there. You stand on an intersection with a giant Disney-esque castle, a replica New York skyline, and the gigantic MGM grand towering over you. A black glass pyramid in the distance, a tower of gold rising behind it. And you can’t imagine how big and imposing and impressive it is. Even London had never managed to make me feel so small.

Looking down The Strip from the top of The Stratosphere.

The fountains at The Bellagio – one of my favourite sights in Vegas, no matter how many times I see it.

My new book, Cold Desert Sky, is partly set in Las Vegas, and it’s a story I’ve been building to – indirectly – ever since that first trip. It’s a unique city, with a fascinating and colourful history, and I knew I wanted to write about it one day. My last trip to Vegas was in 2014, when I was still writing The Dark Inside – but something told me a visit to the Mob Museum wouldn’t be wasted. It’s a great facility, and makes a nice change of pace from the standard day spent in Vegas (and it was well-heated – something that was very welcome on an unusually cold day, even for December. The weather on that trip – blisteringly cold under sunny blue skies – inspired the title of my new novel). I also spent a lot of time wandering around downtown Vegas, where the history of the place is most evident.

The fountains at The Bellagio – one of my favourite sights in Vegas, no matter how many times I see it.

Sure enough, while researching my second novel, Black Night Falling, I discovered its setting, Hot Springs, was a mob hangout frequented by none other than Bugsy Siegel. As the man who built the Flamingo, he laid the blueprint for the Las Vegas we know today. With that connection established, it was too good an opportunity to pass up: Siegel would be the antagonist, and Cold Desert Sky would take in his adopted home town.

Flamingos at The Flamingo.

I’ve been to Vegas a bunch of times, in different groups – sometimes friends, sometimes family, and latterly, even with my oldest daughter. I’ve found it’s always the unexpected experiences that stay with me most. Eating the best pizza you’ve ever tasted, from a takeaway stand inside the New York, New York hotel at 4am. Finding a fine-dining restaurant that matches anything I’ve eaten in Paris, at the top of the Palms hotel – offering a panoramic view of the Strip, to boot. Travelling a few miles out of the city to walk among the stunning landscapes of Valley of Fire national park. It’s a place that always manages to surprise.

Red rocks in the hauntingly beautiful Valley of Fire national park

Cold Desert Sky is the first of my books based in a setting I was familiar with before I started writing. I spent weeks getting to know Texarkana and Hot Springs, before travelling to both cities, for my first two novels. Vegas I felt I knew. I’d heard the cab driver tell the apocryphal story of Howard Hughes buying the hotel he was staying in when they tried to evict him. I’d read the bizarrely reverential plaque to Bugsy Siegel at the modern day Flamingo. I’d got drunk there and lost money there. I’d seen the sleaze and the glamour, the old and the new, all of it sitting side by side, in a city that’s always reinventing itself. Now it was my turn to go back to where it all began, and try to capture that spirit on the page. Cold Desert Sky is, in part, my tribute to Vegas. I hope you’ll enjoy it.

Thank you so much to Rob for sharing the sense of scale and magnitude of Las Vegas and Nevada. Do give him a follow on Twitter and Facebook

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