Monday, October 6, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Skylight Books, Los Angeles
 CLICK HERE TO RSVP _**RSVP is recommended but not required. Entry and seating are first-come, first-served. RSVPs do not guarantee entry to a full event.**_ **A Spanish woman trying to retire as an assassin, a French Foreign Legion deserter from Madagascar, a mysterious (perhaps CIA) woman from America, a billionaire military contractor, and a man wandering the seas alone on a sailing ship bump into each other in the Indian Ocean, and not all of them survive.** Monica has had enough of her life as a contract killer when she meets lonely wanderer Frank Baltimore in a stupidly expensive resort in Madagascar. A few hundred miles away, Alain has had more than enough of his solitary post on a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and so when the mysterious Skye offers him a job, he says yes--he doesn't know if she is CIA, Wagner, Darkwater, or a gangster, but he wants in. She takes him to Diego Garcia, the top-secret US military base in the middle of the Indian Ocean, for training. Things turn ugly and deadly when a man from Frank's past turns up trying to break into the lucrative, secretive, already crowded world of paramilitary contractors. He, Monica, Alain, and Skye end up on his bad side and turn to each other for help. **Tom Lutz** is the author of many books on literature and culture, as well as several books of travel writing and two novels. He taught, formerly, at UC Riverside, University of Iowa, CalArts, University of Copenhagen, and Stanford. He now lives in the French countryside with his wife, the writer and critic Laurie Winer, and their two expatriate cats. **Lisa Teasley** is the author of acclaimed novels Dive and Heat Signature, and the award- winning story collection, Glow in the Dark, published by Bloomsbury. Her latest is the story collection Fluid published by Cune Press. Lisa is the librettist of the coming 2026 world premiere Long Beach Opera The Passion of Nell and the writer/presenter of the BBC television documentary “High School Prom.” Her essays, stories and poems have been much anthologized, including in WW Norton’s Flash Fiction America and Europa Editions’ The Passenger California. Her writings have been translated into Spanish, French, Italian, Swedish, Chinese and Arabic. Lisa was the senior fiction editor for Los Angeles Review of Books, and is a visual artist as well, with a coming solo show next February at the Offus gallery.