Moore is exploring new ground with his latest book, Waking Sleeping Beauty, a neo-noir thriller about redemption and awakening. Los Angeles is sweltering through Holy Week when a teenage hustler named Kiddy is murdered on Hollywood Boulevard in broad daylight. The investigation pulls Detective Joanna Steele into a conspiracy that reaches from Hollywood's shadows to the highest levels of power.
Mia More is on the verge of superstardom when Kiddy crosses her path. What begins as concern becomes something far more dangerous: love, responsibility, and a fierce protective instinct that pulls her back into a world she once escaped. To save him, she may have to risk everything… including her life.
Lana DeMille drifts through Los Angeles with a fractured memory and nowhere left to land. Somewhere in the gaps of what she's forgotten lies the truth about what happened to Kiddy—if she can piece together what she saw before the killer remembers her.
As the investigation tightens and the body count rises, the line between victim and predator blurs. In this dark, fierce reimagining of Sleeping Beauty, three women awaken to a truth someone will kill to keep buried—in a city where the most dangerous stories are the ones no one lives to tell.
Kevin Moore stops by In Reference to Murder to discuss researching and writing the book:
The City of Seekers
Los Angeles has long been known as the City of Dreams. Most people think the dream begins in Hollywood, where aspiring actors, writers, musicians, and filmmakers arrive hoping to reinvent themselves in California's endless sunshine. But Hollywood tells only part of the story. For more than a century, Los Angeles has also been one of America's great centers of spiritual seeking. It gave birth to the Azusa Street Revival, helped launch modern Pentecostalism, became home to Sister Aimee Semple McPherson and Angelus Temple, and welcomed generations in search of healing, purpose, and a deeper understanding of themselves. In many ways, this has been an unconventional story.
Yet the city's spiritual landscape has never belonged to a single tradition. Alongside packed churches and revival meetings, tent revivals, faith healers, psychics, palm readers, trance mediums, astrologers, and metaphysical bookstores flourished. Later, yoga studios, meditation centers, Eastern philosophies, and New Age movements found fertile ground in Southern California. Whether people were searching for God, enlightenment, or simply someone who claimed to know what tomorrow might hold, Los Angeles became a destination for seekers.
At first glance, Hollywood and spirituality seem to inhabit different worlds. One promises worldly success, while the other promises inner transformation. Yet I have come to believe they spring from the same desire. People come to Los Angeles because they believe life can be different from what they are living now.
Some arrive dreaming of fame. Some hunt for fortune. Some come hoping to become someone new. Others come searching for answers to questions that have haunted humanity for centuries.
Why am I here? Is there a purpose to my life? What happens after I die? Some pursue enlightenment. Some pray for healing. Some long for God.
All are searching for transformation. That may also explain why Los Angeles became the natural home of noir. The spiritual searcher and the noir protagonist begin in much the same place. Both sense that something in their lives is incomplete or false, and both are searching for truth. Both are trying to awaken from an illusion or a lie, whether that illusion concerns the world or themselves. The two paths usually diverge in what they discover, but from time to time they converge on the same truth.
Spiritual stories often end in redemption. Noir more often ends in disillusionment. The illusion is stripped away, but what remains isn't always comforting. Sometimes the truth sets us free. Sometimes it exposes corruption, greed, loneliness, betrayal, or violence that has been lurking beneath the dream all along.
Perhaps that is why Los Angeles has produced both traditions in such abundance. It is a city built on possibility. It invites people to imagine a different life, then quietly poses a far more difficult question… Who are you when the dream collides with reality?
Hollywood sells the dream of becoming someone else. Spirituality asks whether you have the courage to become who you truly are. Noir asks what happens when you fail. That question has echoed through Los Angeles for generations. It echoes through the Azusa Street Revival, the sermons of Sister Aimee, the tents of traveling evangelists and spiritualists, the storefront psychics that still dot the city's boulevards, the meditation halls and yoga studios, the novels of Raymond Chandler, and the countless dreamers who arrived believing they could shed their skin and leave their old lives behind.
Some found exactly what they were looking for. Others discovered that the person they needed to confront had been traveling with them all along. “Wherever you go, there you are.”
Los Angeles is often described as a city without history. That criticism has always struck me as absurd. The city has an abundance of history; it simply hides it better than most places. New York wears its history on the surface, while Los Angeles buries it beneath freeways, shopping centers, movie studios, dreams, and infamous murders.
The deeper I explored the city, the more fascinated I became by the forgotten stories hidden in plain sight: vanished neighborhoods, unsolved murders, lost movie palaces, religious revivals, political scandals, and lives that quietly slipped from public memory. The same streets that gave birth to classic noir also witnessed some of America's most influential spiritual movements. The city that manufactured illusion also became a place where millions sought ultimate truth.
As I began writing Waking Sleeping Beauty, I realized I wasn't simply writing a murder mystery set in Hollywood. I was writing a novel about seekers.
Detective Joanna Steele is searching for truth in a city built on illusion, one she grew up in, where her family made B-horror films. Mia More believes she's chasing the Hollywood dream until she discovers something far more meaningful. Lana DeMille wanders through Los Angeles with almost nothing, yet she may see more clearly than anyone else. Each woman is pursuing a different kind of transformation, but all three are trying to wake from a life that no longer reflects who they are.
The murder that brings them together is the plot. The awakening is the story.
Perhaps that's why writing the novel felt less like inventing characters and more like discovering people who had always belonged to Los Angeles. In a city where people have long come to reinvent themselves through fame, faith, fortune, or forgiveness, the line between noir and spirituality isn't as wide as it first appears.
Every noir detective and every spiritual seeker asks a version of the same question. What is true? One searches the dark alleys. The other walks through the dark night of the soul. Both pursue what lies beyond illusion. Maybe that's why Los Angeles remains unlike any other city in America. It is where people come hoping to change their lives. Some discover the dream. Others discover that the dream was never the destination. Either way, Los Angeles remains the city of dreamers and of those in search of God or a deeper spiritual life.
To me, Los Angeles has never been just the City of Dreams. It has always been the city where people come to discover whether the dream they are chasing is the one they truly need.
You can learn more about the author via his website and follow him on Facebook, Instagram, and Goodreads. Waking Sleeping Beauty is now available via all major booksellers.
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