In a Town Called Paradox

"I wasn't looking for Marilyn Monroe when I bumped into her, even though I knew she was in town filming River of No Return..."

So begins In A Town Called Paradox - a novel set in Utah when the Big Five Hollywood studios arrive to shoot their blockbuster movies.

After her mother's sudden death, teenage Corin Dunbar is banished to live with her aunt Jessie, an obsessively religious spinster who runs a failing cattle ranch near a dusty speck of a town called Paradox in southeast Utah.

It's the mid-1950s, and Corin hates her new life, until the arrival of Hollywood turns the rural backwater into a playground for glamorous stars. Seduced by the glitz of the movies, Corin finds work with the studios, but after a brush with the casting couch, channels her growing ambition into saving the ranch-the jewel of the Dunbar family for three generations.

    When Corin falls for Ark Stevenson - a charismatic stranger who was raised by missionaries in the Amazon jungle (then drawn to Paradox by his fascination with the Westerns that are filmed there) - her future seems bright. That's not the outlook facing Yiska Begay, a Navajo Indian and convicted murderer who's on the run near Paradox. These different lives unexpectedly collide when a tragic accident wrecks Corin's dreams and forces her to make an agonizing decision that changes the course of her life forever.

Told mainly by Corin-now a middle-aged woman still haunted by this watershed moment-In A Town Called Paradox is a compelling read that redefines the meaning of love as it asks the question: If each of us has a life story, then who decides how it unfolds - and how it should end?