Detective Sergeant Lloyd Hopkins can’t stand music, or any loud sounds. He’s got a beautiful wife, but he can’t get enough of other women. And instead of bedtime stories, he regales his daughters with bloody crime stories. He’s a thinking man’s cop with a dark past and an obsessive drive to hunt down monsters who prey on the innocent. Now, there’s something haunting him. He sees a connection in a series of increasingly gruesome murders of women committed over a period of twenty years. To solve the case, Hopkins will dump all the rules and risk his career to make the final link and get the killer.

Blood on the Moon examines the evidence, myths, and lies surrounding the political assassination that dramatically altered the course of American history. Was John Wilkes Booth a crazed loner acting out of revenge, or was he the key player in a wide conspiracy aimed at removing the one man who had crushed the Confederacy's dream of independence? Edward Steers Jr. crafts an intimate, engaging narrative of the events leading to Lincoln's death and the political, judicial, and cultural aftermaths of his assassination.

Of the movies that writers and historians call “Noir Westerns,” none is more celebrated than 1948’s Blood on the Moon. The comingling of the Western genre and the noir style crystalized in this extraordinary film, in turn influencing Westerns in the 1950s to become darker and more psychological. Produced during the height of the post–World War II film noir movement, Blood on the Moon is a classic Western immersed in the film noir netherworld of double crosses, government corruption, shabby barrooms, gun-toting goons, and romantic betrayals. With this volume, biographer and noir expert Alan K. Rode brings the film to life for a new generation of readers and film lovers.

"Of those movies categorized as "Noir Westerns" by writers and historians, Blood on the Moon is at the top of the list. Produced during the height of the post-World War II film noir movement, the picture transplanted the dark urban environs of the city into the western iconography. Instead of being framed in a Monument Valley sunset, Robert Mitchum's lone horseman opens the picture as a solitary figure in a dark rainstorm as the Arizona trail replicates the rain slicked streets of Los Angeles. Mitchum's existentialist character of Jim Garry is at odds with the traditional Western hero. Labeled as a "loose rider," he possesses nothing but a borrowed cattleman's outfit. Garry's loyalties shift during his sojourn in an alienist domain where things are assuredly not what they initially seem. The chiaroscuro lighting during the claustrophobic interior scenes and those at nighttime (comprising nearly half the film) depict isolated faces bathed in a stream of light against a black background. Blood on the Moon is a classic western immersed in the film noir netherworld of double crosses, government corruption, shabby barrooms, gun toting goons and romantic betrayals. Blood on the Moon was the first" A" picture directed by thirty-four-year-old Robert Wise (The Set Up, The Day the Earth Stood Still, I Want to Live, Odds Against Tomorrow, West Side Story, The Sound of Music, The Sand Pebbles)"--

David Rivers is a second-generation oilman. From Houston, he runs the multinational oil company built by his father, former Apollo astronaut Michael Rivers, one of the last men alive to walk on the moon. Michael now spends his days confined to an assisted-living facility, his mind succumbing to the ravages of Alzheimer's disease. Somewhere in Michael's crumbling memory is a devastating secret he has revealed to no one in over forty years, not even to his sole surviving child. The secret is the location of a small capsule Michael brought back from the moon in 1972 containing proof that conventional wisdom is a deliberate lie. With the cryptic aid of an anonymous benefactor deep within the ancient and powerful secret society of the Hostmen of Newcastle, David races to unravel the mysteries shrouding his father's legacy while wars, terrorism, and riots over dwindling oil reserves enflame the planet, and a corrupted American presidential election teeters in the balance. David finds himself confronting the same crisis of conscience his father faced decades before. Should he risk his life and company to expose the Hostmen's lies? Or will he bury what he uncovers and let the world burn?