The Juliet
THE JULIET is a novel that braids the history of a cursed emerald called The Juliet with the story of an ailing, retired cowboy actor who comes to Death Valley to search for her. Rigg Dexon, best known for his role as Holt Breck in the classic but controversial seventies Western, Gallows River, holes up for months in a shack known as the Mystery House, until he is driven out of seclusion by the record breaking wildflower bloom of March 2005 that draws swarms of tourists to the desert. After an intense encounter with an ardent fan named Willie Judy at a local bar, Rigg impulsively signs over the deed for the Mystery House to her in a gesture straight out of one of his corny films. But Willie, a rootless, unlucky young woman from a family of short-lived dreamers, takes it as a sign: Dexon wants her to find the Juliet, now that he’s too frail to continue his search. What Willie doesn’t know is that Dexon is giving away everything that’s precious to him, following the advice of Holt Breck: leave like you ain’t coming back. When Dexon’s gift turns out to be the scene of a crime that implicates Willie in drug trafficking, she tries to cover it up, only to be drawn into the chaotic wake of The Juliet...
"As rich, varied, and vivid as the wildflower bloom in Death Valley, The Juliet gives us a panorama of lives desperate to be reinvented and, in that most American story, drawn west for one final chance. Scott's characters' good luck may be fleeting as those rare flowers, but the thrill of following them into the desert lasts through the very last page and beyond."-Steve Himmer author of The Bee-Loud Glade, Fram, and Scratch
"Laura Ellen Scott writes like...well, like Laura Ellen Scott and nobody else. If you've read her before, you know exactly what I mean and would probably offer your firstborn to read her first novel. If you haven't read her: get ready for a brilliant, heady, wild and funnier-than-hell ride through one of the weirdest minds in all contemporary literature."-Amber Sparks, author of The Unfinished World, The Desert Places, and May We Shed These Human Bodies
About Laura Ellen Scott (Washington, DC Author)
Born and raised in the tiny Northern Ohio town of Brimfield, Laura Ellen Scott was named after the classic noir film and song, "Laura," so it makes sense that she enjoys writing dark, quirky fiction in the tradition of Tom Robbins, Kelly Link, and Robert Altman. She started out writing short fiction, and her stories can be found in places like Ploughshares, Pank, Mississippi Review, and Wigleaf, but it wasn’t until she received an out-of-the-blue email from the great Dorothy Allison (BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA) that she started writing novels. That email said, among other things: “Damn you are good. You are just seriously satisfyingly good.” Eventually Allison would blurb Laura’s first novel, DEATH WISHING (Ig Publishing, 2011), a comic fantasy set in post-Katrina New Orleans.
These days she is an author with Pandamoon Publishing, and her latest novel, CRYBABY LANE, is the second book in the NEW ROYAL MYSTERIES, a series set in a fictional college/prison town in Ohio. The first book in the series is THE MEAN BONE IN HER BODY, releases late 2016. Prior to launching the series, Pandamoon published Scott's THE JULIET, a western/mystery about a cursed emerald lost in Death Valley.
Scott is a term full professor in the English Department at George Mason University, and she divides her time between Fairfax, VA and Great Cacapon, WV.
