WELCOME BACK: Mystery writer Robert Ray moved...

WELCOME BACK: Mystery writer Robert Ray moved from Irvine to Seattle last December, but is his hard-boiled detective Matt Murdock leaving too? . . . Ray’s fifth Murdock mystery, due out next summer, takes Murdock up to Seattle. But relax--at book’s end, Murdock buys a ticket home to Newport Beach, Ray says. . . . “One of the strong things in a private-eye book is the local landscape. Orange County has a dark side that’s real black. It has that glitzy surface and Newport and sunshine and Laguna, but there’s all that stuff underneath--gangs and crooked people. It’s wonderful.”