Starlight

By Steven D. Bennett

Hollywood star and icon Cole Carpenter is returning to Newbury, the home of his youth, to be , honored. Among those awaiting his arrival is Bob, his best friend and biggest fan, who always saw the star Cole would become. Along with Laurie, the girl up the street, they forged a bond of friendship that lasted summer after summer. But it's been fifteen summers since Laurie disappeared, the very day Cole left Newbury, and Bob is determined to confront him with the horrible secret he's been carrying since that time; concerning something he wasn't meant to see, and how it holds the key to her disappearance so long ago.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steven D. Bennett
• Release date: Feb 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463043752

Steven D. Bennett

I was born in Boston and grew up in Connecticut and San Diego, which gave me a good background in both history and tanning. I have four children and six grand-children, remarkable in that I am only 35. The fact that I have been married for almost 36 years is the result of an in-utero wedding and honeymoon.I have published many short stories, poems, songs, and recently wrote and directed a musical melodrama that was performed in the San Diego area. With six books under my belt (THE PATH OF DAYS, TRACE THE DEAD EYE, HUMOR OF THE GOSPELS, HUMOR OF THE GOSPELS Daily Study, THRONE and THE CHUCK-IT LIST) I am looking for a bigger belt to stuff the seventh, which hopefully will be completed in time for the Christmas season. It is about a writer who finds to his horror that a mistake he made on page 47 completely invalidates the plot, forcing him to thus track down and kill anyone who has bought the book lest they spread the truth about his miniscule talent. It is titled DON'T READ THIS! and looks to be a best-seller, unless people take the title literally. Fortunately, nothing I write can be taken literally. It is also fortunate I did not stay with the working title: DON'T BUY THIS! Personally, I don't buy a word of it.I also have a blog, I Wandered Off the Tour: A Journey In Self-Publishing, which contains my thoughts and experiences through the tormenting process of creation.Other than writing, I like listening to the same dozen albums and re-runs of the same dozen TV shows I've heard and seen hundreds of times, to the endless delight of my wife.

Book preview

STARLIGHT

by

Steven D. Bennett

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Smashwords Edition

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Copyright © 2020 by Steven D. Bennett

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They were going to dedicate a plaque to him and rename the street where he grew up. Where we grew up. Not officially, but with a sign on top of the old sign, with gold letters to reflect the star he had become. Cole Carpenter Drive. The town declared it Cole Carpenter Day and he had promised, through publicists, he would attend.

Why else would a major motion picture star come back to a jerkwater town of Newbury? Nothing had changed here in the twenty years since he’d left, yet in the same time he had starred in one of the biggest box-office movies of all time, Starlight, along with a prequel and sequel, Starlight Begins and Starlight’s End, which made him famous around the world.

And I was his best friend.

Proximity determined it to be. We were the last house at the bottom of the hill, his family near the top, and that’s how I thought of him, always a little bit higher. I was always in Newbury, his family moving there when I was six. When we were six. We had a unique bond, one that could never be broken, and one solidified by a