The Biggest Liar in Los Angeles

The modern world began in 1926, when Harry Chandler used the persuasive reach of his Los Angeles Times to assure that railroads were out, and cars were in. Since then, Hollywood films have delivered Los Angeles as a prototype for most of world's cities.
    In May of 1926, celebrity evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson went swimming at Ocean Park beach and vanished, presumed drowned. Millions mourned or prayed for her miraculous return. On June 23, she walked out of the Mexican desert and crossed the border into Douglas, Arizona.
     Though her kidnapped story convinced her followers, the district attorney didn’t buy it. He summoned her to a Grand Jury hearing, which was underway when a widely distribute pamphlet reported that a colored man was lynched and found hanging from an oak in Echo Park, only yards from Sister Aimee’s Angelus Temple. The victim was an old friend of Tom Hickey, leader of a dance orchestra, whose distress is aggravated because the police and popular media have apparently conspired to deny the crime occurred.
     Tom recently gave up attending USC, where he starred in football, in order to better raise and protect his sister Florence, a wild seventeen-year-old who fancies speakeasies. Aside from leading the band, Tom works days selling and delivering wholesale meat. Now he adds to his jobs the pursuit of killers, who may belong to the Ku Klux Klan, and the exposure of a city government in cahoots with media giants more dedicated to power and profit than to truth.
     The investigation leads Tom to Angelus Temple and Sister Aimee, who appears to befriend him and offer clues in a veiled and cryptic manner. When she announces an upcoming sermon entitled “The Biggest Liar in Los Angeles,” Tom sees the sermon topic as a clue. He easily compiles his own roster of candidates for the title. They include publishing mogul William Randolph Hearst; Harry Chandler, owner of the Times and a vast real estate empire; Sister Aimee herself; and Tom and Florence’s own well-connected mother, from whose wickedness he snatched Florence six years ago.
     The Biggest Liar in Los Angeles tells a gripping story about memorable characters and resurrects a time and place that, perhaps more than any, created the modern world.

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