Merle Temple's novel, A Ghostly Shade of Pale, Stirs Interest in Hollywood

Tupelo, Mississippi, native Merle Temple has written his first novel, A Ghostly Shade of Pale. It has garnered warm reviews from readers and Southern Writer's Magazine calls it "suspense-driven and you will not want to put it down.his personal experiences make it a compelling read from cover to cover.memories have their way with him so those raw emotions would surface and be laid bare on page after page of remembrances, in order for his readers to feel what he felt." ...........................................................................................................................

Criminal Minds' Jim Clemente says "Ghostly is a crime story as literature. Merle Temple is a great storyteller, writing to all of your senses. He weaves a story so detailed and complex, yet beautifully sinister, that the reader is immersed in the feeling of absolute reality." ...........................................................................................................................

Producers are looking at Merle's novel for a possible movie or TV series, and Merle signed books for the casts of Criminal Minds and Major Crimes while in Hollywood to meet with producers. He also appeared on Media Mayhem in Beverly Hills. Host Allison Hope Weiner said, "Captures the South, the period in the 1960s...evocative of some of the great Southern writers...a taste and feeling for where you are...intriguing, a lot of layers in this fascinating book..." ...........................................................................................................................

Signings from Tupelo's Gum Tree Bookstore to LifeWay in Hollywood, and Barnes and Noble in Las Vegas to Marlowe's in Memphis have been greeted with long lines of book lovers. The crime-mystery thriller is written as fiction but based on Merle's experiences as a narcotics agent in the first declared "War on Drugs" in the early 1970s.

History files on a bygone era are ripped open and rewritten in games of murder, betrayal, the macabre, and the supernatural in A Ghostly Shade of Pale. ........................................................................................................................... Michael Parker comes of age as the tranquility of the old South is shattered in the 1970s by civil unrest, the Vietnam War, and a wave of drug abuse that brings the war on drugs to his front door. Fresh out of Ole Miss, he joins the newly formed Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics and enters a world he is not prepared for. A chain of events unfolds that lead him to become an unlikely player in a game of international intrigue and a clandestine struggle for the soul of America.

The remote crop-duster airfields of Mississippi become launching pads for soldiers of fortune hired by intelligence agencies to smuggle guns into Central America. They return with drugs to fund black operations and shape what their employers call the "Real America." These intelligence rogues employ Fredrick, a murderous psychopath, to manipulate protests against the war and as a contract assassin who has no remorse. They realize too late that his loyalties are not to them or to the communists he also manipulates as a double agent but to the voices in his head that speak to him incessantly.

An uneasy and complex alliance between these shadowy figures, organized crime bosses, and corrupt politicians form a matrix where Fredrick indulges his madness, slimy Mississippi politicians nurture their deviancy, and snipers ambush Michael and his agents on frozen fields of regret. A deadly game of cat and mouse threatens the life of the woman Michael loses and finds again as she washes down black beauties with champagne in the seamy Memphis nightclubs of the Dixie Mafia.

As he searches for an elusive peace and tries to resist the charms of his troubled lover, the Dixie Mafia tries to kill him, mob lawyers try to bribe him, and the Bureau of Narcotics is infiltrated and compromised. Parker, a modern paladin in search of just causes and dragons to slay, is a cop-philosopher commenting on the world in which he travels as he awakens at twenty-six to find that the whole of his life-his notion of right and wrong and good and evil-was all a lie.

The plan to alter America filters down to and corrupts government at all levels and claims the lives of those who could never know or imagine the origin of their demise. It all comes unraveled in the madness of Fredrick and the conflicted state police agent who unwittingly becomes the fly in the ointment to machinations he cannot begin to grasp until he is forced to fight for his life and the lives of those he loves against enemies seen and unseen. ...........................................................................................................................

A Ghostly Shade of Pale, the first in a trilogy, is available in hardback and eBook (Nook, Kindle, and iTunes) at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble at bn.com, Gum Tree Bookstore in Tupelo, MS., Square Books in Oxford, MS., TurnRow Books in Greenwood, MS., Lemuria Bookstore in Jackson, MS., Barnes and Noble in Tupelo, MS and Henderson, Nevada, and LifeWay Books in Tupelo, MS. and Brea, CA.

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