The Summer of '84 was Murder….
She had a heart like a race horse. She was the star player on a mediocre team. She was fifteen years old. It took her forty-five minutes to die.
April 4th, 1984. Fidelis, CA- Star volleyball player Sarah Luger is stabbed to death on her front doorstep coming home from a party. After the biggest manhunt in Aurora county history, Det Lt. Charles Sariano is called in to investigate, and finds that in Fidelis, nothing is what it seems.
Police describe the scene as "...grisly beyond description." Fidelis, where the kids go to Ivy League schools and PAC-10 Universities, where the pressure to succeed is overwhelming, where status is everything, is turned upside down.
No kid kills and keeps it a secret. Fidelis calls on Det. Lt. Charles Sariano, famed for capturing the Capricorn Killer fifteen years earlier. Instead of profiling Sarah's killer, Sariano and his team, (who have a few secrets of their own) profile Sarah, and uncover a landline filled childhood cut short one fateful night.
Sarah Luger is a gripping murder mystery, a coming of age story, and also a profoundly moving story of a town full of secrets where "it can't happen here."
"The revolving flashbacks add a layer of psychological intrigue that increasingly ratchet up the dramatic tension, mounting, at last, to a surprising conclusion...I would recommend it to any fan of hardboiled noir fiction."
- Broken Pencil magazine
"Sarah Luger author Sebastian Corbascio takes readers inside the minds of the characters in this tightly plotted, un-put-down-able old fashioned murder mystery. Read this late at night at your own risk, you may not go to sleep as soon as you like."
- Joel Selvin. San Francisco Chronicle Rock Critic, and author of Altamont: The Rolling Stones, The Hell's Angels, and the Inside Story of Rock's Darkest Day.
"…filled with hard-boiled cops, tough-talking suspects, quirky dialogue, multiple red herrings, and even a few surprises that seasoned genre readers won’t see coming."
-from
Morbidly Beautiful review.
"
Sarah Luger trades in anything close to nostalgia and romanticism to give the story a very raw and believable edge. Rather than reveling in the delights of being a teenager, this book takes a serious look at those formative years that shape us all in an unflinching way. Seeing that puzzle become complete as every loose story thread weaves itself together is what makes this novel stand out from a lot of other cliché or typical entries in the genre -Alexander Young,
V-13 Magazine"...despite this superficial evocation of beautiful Dead Girls such as Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer or John Everett Millais’s “Ophelia”, the eponymous Sarah Luger is no mere cadaver, a posthumous mystery to be solved. Instead, Sarah emerges as a fascinating character in her own right. The novel which bears her name may center on the attempts of male detectives to unravel Sarah’s murder, but as the story progresses, it is Sarah herself who most ardently commands our attention. No mere idealized, tragic beauty, Sarah Luger is revealed as a complex, multifaceted and often deeply unpleasant character. It is this nuance that elevates Corbascio’s novel above many standard modern mysteries. While the detectives who investigate Sarah’s shocking murder and the suspects they interrogate are all intriguing characters, it is Sarah herself who, through a series of flashbacks and recollections, comes to dominate the novel. Unlike Bolin’s typical Dead Girl, Sarah is not just a memory. She is a character who, despite her early death, grows and develops over the course of the novel. Moreover, Sarah is allowed to be an unlikeable character, possessing a level of moral ambiguity rarely afforded to women in fiction.
-Prof Miranada Corcoran, Cork University
