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Fiction Grit and wit CATALINA EDDY A Novel in Three Decades By Daniel Pyne 480 pp. Blue Rider Press Reviewed by Eric Petersen Novelist and screenwriter Daniel Pyne is back with a collection of three very different yet loosely connected crime novellas, set in Southern California thirty years apart from each other, all of them focused on murder cases and tied together by characters wounded by regret and longing for atonement. The first novella, The Big Empty , opens in Hollywood, circa 1954, at the apex of the Cold War and the Red Scare. Army veteran turned hard-boiled detective Rylan Lovely literally walks into the hardest case he’s ever worked – the murder of his estranged wife Isla, whom he’d left several years earlier. Lovely blames himself for the failure of their marriage, even though Isla had an affair with his best friend. Her murder is punctuated by the invention of the H-bomb, which has ratcheted up Cold War tensions to a whole new level. Racked with guilt and determined to nai...