The Ticket Out - Tapa dura

Her unfulfilling job as a movie critic for a counterculture periodical violently interrupted when a young film student is murdered, Ann Whitehead fights with a disgraced LAPD detective over her coverage of the investigation and discovers a link between the victim and her missing script. A first novel. 35,000 first printing.

"An astonishingly muscular, poetic, nerve-cauterized literary debut.
Helen Knode is a thoroughbred provocateuse." -- Bruce Wagner, author of I'm Losing You

"Helen Knode is so canny about noir atmospherics and gestures that her still more cunning emotional refinements slip up on you like a silent stalker down one of the secret tunnels that underpin her coruscating vision of Hollywood past, Hollywood future. Ann Whitehead is a sly, challenging, and ultimately dazzling creation. As a wounded and damaged daughter turned bored and sardonic LA film critic, Whitehead comes to discover how little she knows about the movies, or her own desires. Elegiac and electrifying, The Ticket Out is her -- and our -- education, and a shrewd, troubling book." -- Robert Polito
|"An astonishingly muscular, poetic, nerve-cauterized literary debut.
Helen Knode is a thoroughbred provocateuse." -- Bruce Wagner, author of I'm Losing You

"Helen Knode is so canny about noir atmospherics and gestures that her still more cunning emotional refinements slip up on you like a silent stalker down one of the secret tunnels that underpin her coruscating vision of Hollywood past, Hollywood future. Ann Whitehead is a sly, challenging, and ultimately dazzling creation. As a wounded and damaged daughter turned bored and sardonic LA film critic, Whitehead comes to discover how little she knows about the movies, or her own desires. Elegiac and electrifying, The Ticket Out is her -- and our -- education, and a shrewd, troubling book." -- Robert Polito