Palm Avenue (Paperback)

Every year thousands of naïve young women arrive in Los Angeles, full of ambition and dreams of stardom. Few realize that there is a steep price of admission into the club that involves flesh, blood, and large chunks of soul. Ashley Duncan flees her small Kansas hometown and family farm to pursue the Hollywood dream. She takes a crash course on how to succeed in Tinseltown, trading on her looks and sexuality. An agent she meets sums it up this way, “I’ll be honest with you, Ashley. You have the look that we’re looking for. You definitely have the look, but a lot of girls have that. A lot of girls have talent. The question is, do you have everything else it takes? Do you have the temperament, the guile, the cajones, to do what it takes?” Ashley decides early on, she will do whatever is necessary. Things get more complicated when Ashley’s high school sweetheart, Brady, arrives in LA, in a desperate attempt to win her back. Ashley and Brady don’t realize it, but they are now guests of that infamous California hotel, where you can check out, but you can never leave.

Rob Neighbors grew up in Sheridan, Wyoming, near the base of the beautiful Big Horn Mountains. Hollywood was calling him from an early age, and he wrote his first screenplay when he was in the third grade. As he grew older, he stuffed all of those aspirations down and dismissed them as childish dreams. Everything changed when a production company was in Sheridan filming a movie, and Neighbors met actor Ben Johnson, who encouraged him to go for his dream. Neighbors gambled with destiny and left a promising career in his family's business to attend college at Montana State University in Bozeman, where he majored in film and television production. Before he graduated, Neighbors had production companies in Los Angeles courting him as a result of a screenplay he wrote. The film was never made, but he was hired to write several screenplays, and some were produced with major stars, including Dennis Hopper, Michael Madsen, and Charles Durning. Life in Los Angeles and the movie business can be full of diversions and disappointments, and Neighbors succumbed to some of them. He battled alcohol and drug addiction and remained on the sidelines for over fifteen years. He is now clean and sober and writing again. Palm Avenue is his first novel.