After a long and successful career as a theatre director in Manhattan, fifty-something Claire Gray succumbed to a tempting offer to establish the theatre department at the new and very well funded Desert Arts College in Palm Springs. It has proven to be an exciting opportunity for Claire but now she's facing the end of her first academic year with a measure of melancholy. Not only is the spring production about to end but her student and clandestine lover, Tanner Griffin, is about to leave school for Hollywood. The person responsible - renowned producer Spencer Wallace - spotted Tanner in an earlier school stage production and signed him to a role in his next film, Photo Flash. Now with the closing performance of the spring production completed, the cast party at Claire's house promises to be a bittersweet affair. What Claire gets, however, is more than she bargained for when, in the middle of the very crowded affair, Spencer Wallace turns up dead in Claire's pool. To make it worse, Claire herself is one of the most probable suspects - with means, motive, and opportunity to have committed the deed. But Wallace is a man with a past and a reputation - and there are far more than a handful of people with better reasons to wish him harm. Now, with time running short, it falls to Claire to figure out who is really responsible before someone else gets away with the crime and leaves her holding the bag. The novel "Desert Spring" shares the same plot as my stage play, "Photo Flash," which was drafted about a year prior to the book. Because a play is a more compact literary form than a novel, I wanted to address the restrictions and challenges of that medium first, then "open up" the story in its novelized version. While the novel contains much familiar dialogue from the play, it brings considerably more depth, detail, and texture to the story, primarily through the introspection of Claire Gray, who serves as narrator. This whodunit is told with a good deal of humor, but it is underlaid by a romantic subplot dealing with Claire’s evolving relationship with the much younger actor, Tanner Griffin. He is on the verge of stardom, which was Claire’s goal, but ironically, their success spells the end of their offbeat romance. This bittersweet reality is an ambiguous emotional thread running throughout the entire story, which stands in contrast to the humor and serves to frame the central murder plot in a way that I found curiously satisfying to write. I hope you will take similar pleasure in reading "Desert Spring." Michael Craft is the author of several novels, two of which were finalists for a Lambda Literary Award, as well as the play Photo Flash . He divides his time between Kenosha, Wisconsin and Palm Springs, California, which is the setting for the Claire Gray novels. Desert Spring PART ONEphoto flash1"Claire." The whisper came from behind, mouthed over my shoulder in the darkness. My name drifted forward on warm, stale breath with a thin cloak of mint. "It hasn't aged a bit--fresh as the day you wrote it.""It" was a play titled Traders. I hadn't written it in a day, but over the course of several months, some five years earlier, when I had suspended my directing career on Broadway and retreated to my alma mater to spend a year as a visiting professor. That hiatus, during which I was tucked away in a sleepy college town in the foothills of the Berkshires, had been prompted by an itch to try my hand as a playwright. By all accounts, I succeeded. Traders enjoyed instant critical acclaim when I premiered it at Evans College that spring, and the show met subsequent success both on Broadway (under my own direction, of course) and in Hollywood, where the play was adapted to film. I snagged a Tony; the Oscar was a near miss.History, in a sense, was now repeating itself. On a Saturday night in April, I sat in the darkened auditorium of a theater on a college campus, watching a performance of Traders that I had directed. But I was nowhere near the Berkshires; I was some three thousand miles southwest, in the Sonoran Desert, near Palm Springs, California, on the campus of Desert Arts College. And this time, I was not a visiting professor, but head of the theater department, a permanentcareer shift that I had embarked upon the previous autumn. At fifty-four, I was starting over."Claire," repeated Kiki, resting her fingers on my shoulder, speaking into my ear, "you've outdone yourself. The role was made for Tanner." Each whispered word ruffled a tuft of hair at my temple. I shuddered as a tickling sensation shot down my neck.I acknowledged her praise mutely, reaching to pat her fingers. Our silent touch conveyed an easy, wordless understanding rooted in more than thirty years of friendship.Kiki Jasper-Plunkett had attended Evans with me as a fellow theater major. We'd graduated on the same day, then had gone our separate ways, each on a quest for theatrical glory, mine in directing, hers in costuming. My path had