A.R. Taylor is an award-winning playwright, essayist, and fiction writer. Her debut novel, Sex, Rain, and Cold Fusion, won a Gold Medal for Best Regional Fiction at the Independent Publisher Book Awards 2015, was a USA Best Book Awards Finalist, and Kirkus Reviews named it one of the 12 Most Cinematic Indie Books of 2014. She’s been published in the Los Angeles Times, the Southwest Review, Pedantic Monthly, The Cynic online magazine, the Berkeley Insider, So It Goes—the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library Magazine on Humor, Red Rock Review, and Rosebud.

In her past life, Taylor was head writer on two Emmy-winning series for public television. She has performed at the Gotham Comedy Club in New York, Tongue & Groove in Hollywood, also at Lit Crawl L.A. 2016. You can find her video blog Trailing Edge: Ideas Whose Time Has Come and Gone at her website www.lonecamel.com.

Call Me When You’re Dead is a darkly comic novel about payback gone wild, gone sour, maybe even sweet. “If anything bad happens to me, I want you to get him.” That’s what Eleanor Birch’s glamorous friend Sasha Cole requests of her during a New York City dinner one hot August night. Something bad does happen, and Eleanor is forced to become another person altogether in the wilds of Manhattan, acting as her own little Pygmalion in the harsh world of advertising and its remorseless denizens. How she triumphs, and how her prey becomes first her ally and then her lover, makes her journey a tragic romp, a hilarious disaster, and even an all-out farce—but one with very serious consequences.

Twenty-four years old and newly employed in Manhattan, Jenna McCann agrees to place herself under the dead body of a wealthy, prominent New Yorker—her boss—to hide the identity of his real lover. But why?

Because she is half in love with him herself; because her only friend at Hull Industries asked her to; because she feared everyone around her; because she had no idea how this would spin out into her own, undeveloped life; because she had nothing and no one?

Or just because?

Deftly told and sharply observed, Jenna Takes the Fall is the story of someone who became infamous . . . before she became anybody at all.