The Neon Repairman of Yucca Valley
A Novel

About this book:

In the blistering heat of the Mojave, Calvin Vance has spent thirty years coaxing light from glass—bending lead tubing, balancing noble gases, nursing the dying neon of a vanishing California. He's content in his tin shed, surrounded by the rusted skeletons of roadside dreams, until a man in a linen suit arrives with an aluminum case containing a ghost: a fragment of the Blue Flamingo, the legendary sign that once painted the desert turquoise for miles. The job is impossible. The glass is forty years dead. The transformers are buried. And the canyon where it stood has been empty since the highway moved south.

But Julian Orr isn't asking for a repair. He's offering a resurrection—backed by a trust with deep pockets and deeper secrets, and a contract that pulls Calvin back to the one master he couldn't outrun: Harlan Miller, the boiler-tech bender who taught him that glass holds a grudge. To bring the Flamingo back, Calvin must navigate washed-out desert tracks, dead transformers humming with ghost voltage, and the fragile, mercury-poisoned tubes that remember every hand that shaped them. Some circuits were never meant to be re-energized. Some lights attract things that hunt in the dark.

Atmospheric, technically precise, and haunted by the glow of a vanished America, *The Neon Repairman of Yucca Valley* is a novel about craft and consequence, about the currents buried beneath the sand, and the stubborn, dangerous act of striking an arc against the night.