Book excerpt: Ty Seward is a sick man. Anorexic, sexually aberrant, and haunted by a ghostly apparition residing in his closet. Living in the shadow of an in-remission cancer he fully expects to return, Ty bitterly earns his meager living by working as an assistant to his uncle, a business-and-media mogul who runs a lucrative child prostitution ring catering to the Hollywood elite. When Ty's line of work introduces him to a precocious teenage girl who seems to possess a shrewdly keen insight into his inner machinations, he is forced to confront his hidden demons and repressed trauma, embarking on a bleak and harrowing odyssey of self-discovery in the decomposing City of Angels.