About this item
Undercover cop Paul Santo chased drug dealers and junkies through the worst parts of New York City during the worst of times. He did his job well and was decorated for it. But times have changed and so has Santo. After decades on the job, he was fed up with the pressures from bosses and the street. He snapped one boozy night, retired the next day, and after a family tragedy, drove cross-country with his estranged daughter to begin a new life in the mysterious California high desert. Just as the Joshua trees reach up to the heavens, Pauls journey transcends earthly ambitions when strange sightings could mean a path to enlightenment, or madness.
About the Author
Steven Schindler
Biography
Born and raised in the Bronx, Steven Schindler's first two novels, Sewer Balls and From the Block, are artfully gritty portrayals of the neighborhood characters who hung out on the stoops, playgrounds, rooftops and barstools during the crazy days of the Bronx in the sixties and seventies. Both books offer a heavy dose of mad, inner-city youthful adventures laced with awkward teenage sex, rock and roll, and the search for the perfect egg cream, i.e. the essence of life itself.
After graduating with a degree in film and theatre from Hunter College, he soon found himself acting in off-off Broadway productions around the city, including a geodesic dome in the Bronx, an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, a loft in SoHo and at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village. Bartering a deal at a prominent NY drama school to videotape classes in exchange for acting lessons, he discovered that he enjoyed life more from behind the camera than in front of it. (He denies that a lousy review of one of his performances in the Village Voice led to this decision.)
Enrolling in a video documentary class turned out to be the first step in a career that has spanned over twenty years in television production. From assisting "underground" video documentarians in SoHo, (Schindler's own doc really was underground- it was about an elderly blind lady who played the accordion in the subway, called Subway Mary) to catching criminals on the FBI's most wanted list for America's Most Wanted, to conducting exclusive interviews with The Who, Schindler is an award winning writer and producer who currently lives in Los Angeles. He has won four Chicago Emmy awards, and has written and produced news, sports, documentary, TV magazines, entertainment, promotion and reality television.
His third novel, From Here to Reality (Simon & Schuster/Pocket Books) , is a hilarious send-up of a transplanted New Yorker's foray into the early days of reality television in Hollywood, and received praise from Jay Leno and Roger L. Simon (The Big Fix)
Schindler's fourth novel, On the Bluffs, is a thrilling love story wrapped in a dysfunctional family mystery that begins on the trendy streets of Washington D.C. and winds up in a rundown mansion on the bluffs of Cape Cod. "Sometimes the biggest lies are the ones we live," Schindler says, referring to the characters who bring his latest novel to life.
THE LAST SEWER BALL, released in 2013 was the Grand Prize Winner at the New York Book Festival. The judges called it "Masterful... a novel true New Yorkers must read."
HIGH DESERT HIGH, Schindler's sixth novel, is his latest with a release date of November 7, 2107.
