NEVADA CITY/ST.AUGUSTINE January 28, 2020 – If you mixed dark-side elements of of Sex, Drugs & Rock and Roll with saucy exploits from Peyton Place, you would have Adrian’s Revenge –– a provocative debut novel by Nevada City native Keith Davies. The book is receiving five-star reviews and creating considerable buzz in the author’s hometown as residents there try to determine how much is fact and how much is fiction.
Adrian’s Revenge is a fast-paced trip back in time –– a candid, shocking trip that will, for many readers, spark haunting memories of the freewheeling 1980s, when lines of white powder turned otherwise-decent people into ruthless demons.
Set in mythical Gold City, California, the story revolves around wanderlust Adrian Davis –– who returns home from years on the road hustling merchandise at major rock & roll concerts and takes over a small bar owned by his grandparents.
For Davis, however, a nightclub with live music holds greater attraction than a 10-stool bar with redneck loggers and sawmill workers tossing down beers and shots, so he expands the space, gussies it up with a 1940s Hollywood motif, and names it Bogart’s. But as Davis soon learns, owning a nightclub in Gold City in the 1980s, with his customers in search of high-octane drugs and unbridled sex, was flirting with danger.
Drugs were plentiful, women were willing, and self-discipline was not part of the small-town nightclub scene, so the police chief was ordered to find a way to shutter Bogart’s and get Adrian in jail.
Although Davis is killed in the second chapter, a manuscript he left behind leads readers through a maze of twists and turns chronicling his life, and finds him confessing to unpunished crimes and sexual adventures that would make most hedonists blush. He eventually finds salvation and turns his troubled life into a successful law career, but his circuitous path to respectability is littered with startling backstories –– including murder.
Is Gold City really Nevada City? And is Adrian Davis really Keith Davies? The author isn’t saying, but long-time Nevada City residents agree that it’s an accurate, tantalizing account of local life in the 1980s –– reminiscent of how Grace Metalious described Peyton Place in the 1950s.
Subtitled, Addiction, Conspiracy, Murder & Redemption, the recently-released Keith Davies book is available through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online sources.