Peace is brutal for one gritty heroine

JUDGING by the fifth novel to feature the battered but unbowed paparazzo-on-parole Nina Zero, Robert Eversz’s highly original noirish series has come to a conclusion of sorts.

A decade ago in “Shooting Elvis,” her initial stroll down L.A.’s meaner streets, Nina recalled that she was once Mary Alice Baker, a “good girl” from a dysfunctional family, leading a repressed life of quiet desperation as a baby photographer. The noise level of her desperation grew when, a victim of love, Mary Alice unwittingly blew up a terminal at LAX. To elude the police long enough for her to get even with her former boyfriend and the gang who set up the explosion, the hunted “terrorist” transformed herself into the hip, trash-talking Nina, hair dyed jet black, rhinestone stud in her nose. She got her men and publicity for her cause but wound up behind bars anyway.

Nina’s next three adventures (“Killing Paparazzi,” “Burning Garbo” and “Digging James Dean”) have followed her from prison to professional success, working the flash celebrity beat for a tabloid with the amusing name Scandal Times. Though burdened by an abnormal amount of bum luck, she has managed to solve several murders in between money snapshots. She’s even made a few friends who haven’t died shortly thereafter, most notably an avuncular Scandal Times investigative reporter named Frank and a toothless Rottweiler referred to lovingly as “the Rott.” But this hasn’t helped to lift her feeling of isolation and remoteness or satisfy her need to understand the purpose of her life.

At the start of the new novel, Nina is poised to become “the first serious photographer to cross over [to fine artist] since Weegee,” according to the gallery owner who is giving her a one-woman show. But at the cocktail party celebrating that event, a too-handsome cop appears with a DVD sent to Nina at Scandal Times. On it is a bondage scene in which the model she used in her photographs is apparently being strangled. Definitely a downer on what she’d been calling “the biggest night of my life.”

The discovery of the model’s corpse sends Nina off on another quest for revenge, this one complicated by the sudden reappearance in her life of her abusive father. “His beatings taught me discipline, how to walk quietly and be silent, how to tune into the moods of your opponent and hit him before he hits you or run before he strikes. Above all, he taught me how to watch. I’m a photographer because of him, because of my fear of him.”

The old man has changed. It’s not just his weary-with-age appearance but his seemingly sincere desire to make amends for the past. Her inclination to let him, along with her accepting the unofficial guardianship of her late sister’s child, an antisocial Goth teen named Cassie, suggest that Nina’s life is about to take on a new, positive meaning.

Once the model’s murderer is caught and a soured romance is settled, Nina does find peace at last, though in a most unusual manner. Since it’s impossible to even hint at the book’s ending without spoiling its effect let’s just say it’s one of the strangest resolutions I can recall in more than two decades of reviewing -- happy and sad and bizarre and totally satisfying.

This shouldn’t come as a complete surprise to anyone familiar with the ingenuity Eversz has displayed in this series. He has, after all, created a unique narrator-protagonist who observes Southern California’s fault lines, and her own, with a cynic’s eye and a satirist’s tongue, and whose language and style are on the cutting edge of hip without tipping her into the shallow chick-lit box.

Nor are the novels light on plot. “Zero to the Bone” matches Nina’s complex personal story with a substantial murder mystery involving sadomasochism among the Hollywood mogul set, crooked cops, a sleazy private eye and, in a particularly riveting sequence, a full-fanged pit bull that attacks the dentally deprived Rott.

Even more impressive is the author’s overall view of the books. In the first few pages of Nina’s debut novel, there are several indications, including the mention of Cassie, that Eversz had the whole quintet in mind right from the jump. Anybody with that much fictional foresight must have his next move figured. Whether it’s a new phase for Nina or, more likely, the start of a Cassie series, or some other yarn entirely, odds are it’ll be worth investigating.

Dick Lochte, author of the suspense thriller “Sleeping Dog,” is a frequent contributor to Book Review.