Tommy Bahama Miramonte Resort and Spa, Grand Ballroom I View map Free Event

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45000 Indian Wells Ln, Indian Wells, CA 92210

https://palmdesertmfa.ucr.edu/ #artsandletters

Join us at the Tommy Bahama Miramonte Resort for a very special edition of UCR Palm Desert’s acclaimed Arts & Letters lecture series as we launch Baby Queen, the debut crime novel from Ty Landers. Dennis Lehane called Baby Queen, ""A terrific debut. A taut, wholly unique thriller with great characters told with confidence and flair," while Robert Crais called Landers "the next Elmore Leonard!" And the critics have been effusive, too, including rave reviews in Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, and Library Journal. Landers will be discussing his debut with Tod Goldberg in an intimate conversation, followed by a book signing.

Seating is limited to 100 guests.

About Baby Queen:
For lovers of Ozark or Breaking Bad, a page-turning debut involving an Alabama family business, a dead body, a dogged investigator, and three generations of women who are forced to confront the secrets, betrayals, and buried crimes that haunt their family.

A perfectly preserved but very dead body is found in a barrel of honey, and the town of Noccalula, Alabama, will never be the same. Natalie Link has inherited the family honey farm from her beloved grandmother Lana, who raised Nat after her mother ran off to Los Angeles chasing stardom. But it turns out Nat has no idea what Lana has been hiding in the hives. Is Nat up to running what turns out to be a business enterprise of questionable repute? Suddenly she is caught between her grandmother’s very frightening partners and the ex-cop with a grudge who’s been looking into her family since she was a kid. Full of secrets, murder, and Alabama fried frog legs, Baby Queen is a sharp-as-a-blade tale of family crime. “Ty Landers has a Daniel Woodrell-like gift for finding beauty in hard places. And make no mistake, Baby Queen is filled with those hard places, but it’s also equal parts menace and black humor, each rendered through Landers’s bone-deep Southern roots," say MFA director Tod Goldberg. "This is a debut as assured as any you’ll ever read and an instant classic. Count me a huge fan.”

December 5, 2026
8 PM

TOMMY BAHAMA MIRAMONTE RESORT & SPA
Grand Ballroom I
45000 Indian Wells Ln.
Indian Wells, CA 92210


BIOS
Ty Landers holds an MFA in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California, Riverside. Born and raised in Alabama, he spent more than twenty years in Nashville, Tennessee, before moving to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, with his wife, Emily, and their sons Jack, Rowan, and Barrett. Baby Queen is his first novel and has already been optioned by HBO.

Tod Goldberg  is the New York Times bestselling author of sixteen books, including Only Way Out, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the acclaimed Gangsterland quartet — Gangsterland, Gangster Nation, The Low Desert: Gangster Stories and Gangsters Don’t Die — which have been published in a dozen countries and have won or have been a finalist for the Hammett Prize, the Southwest Book of the Year, the Strand Critics Award, the Reading the West Award, the International Thriller of the Year and many more. His previous books include Living Dead Girl, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, The House of Secrets, which he wrote with Brad Meltzer, and the anthology Eight Very Bad Nights, a finalist for the Anthony Award. Tod is a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside where he founded and directs the Low Residency MFA in Creative Writing & Writing for the Performing Arts. His next book, The Salton Sea, will be published by Counterpoint Press.