Bottom Feeders

February 26, 2018
At the outset of screenwriter and director Shepphird’s promising debut, a sales executive headed for a conference at California’s Lake Arrowhead hits a deer while driving at night on a mountain road. When he gets out of his car, he’s shot with an arrow and bludgeoned to death. Cut to down-on-his-luck director Eddie Lyons, who is considering an offer to direct a made-for-TV movie featuring a has-been actress portraying a pioneering schoolteacher in the Old West. Eddie swallows his pride and accepts the job, even after learning that he wasn’t the producer’s first choice, an ego blow partially softened by his former lover, Sheila, serving as the assistant camerawoman. The low-budget project is scheduled to film in San Bernardino County on a tight schedule, but the pressures of making the deadline are forgotten after members of the cast and crew become the targets of a murderous archer, leaving Eddie and Sheila scrambling to survive. Shepphird maintains suspense right up to the disappointing solution to the murder mystery. Still, thriller fans will be curious to see what he does next. Agent: Peter Rubie, FinePrint Literary Management.

April 1, 2018

When Sheila accepts the job as assistant camera operator on a quick two-week, made-for-cable Western, she recognizes everyone involved with the production, from the director to the animal handlers, as the bottom feeders of the film industry, just trying to scrape by. But once they are on the remote set, they discover that someone is using the entire crew as target practice. It's a method the deputy sheriff has seen before, killing people with a powerful bow and metal-tipped arrow. The killer tracks and slaughters as many people as possible. Why is this production team targeted? VERDICT Although it starts out slowly, introducing all the players and their roles, this thriller quickly escalates into a violent, gory story with few likable characters. With the author's ("Shill" trilogy) background in TV and film, this reads as a script for a violent horror movie. Reminiscent of Gina Wohlsdorf's Security, it may intrigue fans of that novel.--Lesa Holstine, Evansville Vanderburgh P.L., IN

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

January 1, 2018
Is it harder to dodge the weapons of death aimed by an obsessive archer or to wrap up a bare-bones TV movie on time and under budget? Shepphird (Beware the Shill, 2016, etc.) presents enough evidence on both sides to let you make the call.Tapped by executive producer Sam Carver to replace director Chris Sanderson in a Little House on the Prairie knockoff for aging TV actress Tami Romans, Eddie Lyons knows he'll say yes even before reading the script because it's better to be working than not. Or maybe it isn't, as he finds when he arrives for the two-week shoot at Crescent Movie Ranch, a spot so authentic that there's no cellphone reception. Apart from Tami, whose three personal assistants soak up disproportionate amounts of the budget and real estate, the rest of the talent, from character actor Tom Birch to closeted gay cinematographer Giovanni to animal wranglers Jimmy and Lucky, are bottom feeders better known for their cut-rate reliability and efficiency than their star power. The shoot reunites Eddie with Sheila, an assistant cinematographer he slept with once in a drunken fling and who's now clearly embarrassed that they've been thrown together again. Tami demands costly rewrites that Eddie knows will never get approved; Tom demands to wear an inappropriate cowboy hat that will make his face harder to light. Just when you've settled in for an agreeable comedy of low-budget filmmaking, Jimmy's corpse turns up in a stagecoach with an arrow protruding from his eye. Nor is this just one more problem among many in the production, for virtually every person involved in the shoot will soon become a target in a shoot of quite a different sort.Instead of attempting to link the drastically different halves of this tale, Shepphird seems to revel in the contrast between them. Like-minded readers will get two stories for the price of one; others may be more wary.

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February 15, 2018
Director Eddie Lyons has resigned himself to never being recognized as an auteur, but he's proud of the low-budget films and TV shows he has brought in on time and under budget. He drives an aged Subaru, drinks Popov vodka, and is lonely, depressed, and lovelorn. But the chance to direct a made-for-TV western starring an aging, self-absorbed former TV star, who hopes the film will jump-start her career, energizes Eddie. The rock-bottom budget, 14-day shooting schedule, and willful star take a backseat when members of the crew and cast begin to die at the hands of a mysterious, homicidal archer. Eddie is bedeviled byin addition to the star and her entouragea male actor whose greatest success came doing Shakespeare in Cincinnati and who plans to bleed the production for every possible dollar, as well as by a California wildfire that threatens to envelop the film's location, if the archer doesn't kill everyone first. Shepphird is himself a low-budget film director, and his novel works best when illuminating the myriad challenges of making a movie.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)