"Buck Winthrop has expertly encapsulated the shallow, superficial, scandalous, over-hyped, often unintentionally hilarious nature of South Beach's nascent halcyon days in Ocean Drive, a novel that fuses fact with fiction in a marvelous mashup of Magic City zeitgeist."
“It was about trying to stay sane in an insane world,” Gabrielle Sampson laments in a moment of inner dialogue. It’s at this juncture when we come to realize the motives behind our main character in Ocean Drive and her primary objective: crushing the illusion of fame and happiness that had been constructed in South Beach, Miami in the year of 1999.
The novel begins with us being introduced to this beautiful, ethereal person, Elle Simpson, and her connection to a story written in the Miami Herald detailing four mysterious, seemingly-related deaths. We plunge ahead into the back story of this individual, and come to learn about her horrible past and how she smartly positions herself to take over the South Beach magazine. (This publication is described as far-reaching and very influential in the world of the arts.)
Winthrop, with his background in the entertainment industry, public relations, writing and marketing, does a wonderful job giving these characters a genuine sense of identity. They are all mostly cold, narcissistic, drug-fueled people that see only the world they’ve created on Ocean Drive in Miami. As a result, Simpson sees this confluence of designers, photographers, actors and artists through a lens of hatred and revenge.
LOS ANGELES, Nov. 18, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Author Buck Winthrop has released his second novel, Ocean Drive worldwide on iTunes, Amazon Kindle and Barnes & Noble Nook. It is a "spinoff" of Delusions of Grandeur, and the second installment of the Shattered Delusions trilogy.
It is 2013 and L.A. screenwriter Toby Brent has received twenty-five cassette tapes from Elle Sampson, a woman at the center of a notorious Miami scandal in 1999. Suffering from writer's block, he accepts an invitation to return to Miami to attend the annual South Beach magazine party hosted by Kim Kardashian and Kayne West.
Ocean Drive Book Cover
After a flash-forward, Ocean Drive tells two compelling stories: the modern day Elle, alternating chapter by chapter with the childhood "Gabrielle." The two tales merge dramatically in the final act towards what the author calls, "a shocking climax."
"Ocean Drive is pure narrative drive," says the author. "It is a book for the digital age where people are glued to their iPhones and iPads all day long. There is no fat. The chapters are short and fast-paced where (hopefully) you want to read just one more."
Ocean Drive had its origins in 2001 as a WET magazine serial, Gabrielle, Diary of a South Beach It Girl. Many incarnations followed over the years. The author put it aside to finish Delusions of Grandeur in 2010 and ultimately created a trilogy called Shattered Delusions. "The books are not sequels in the classic sense. They are "spinoffs," Winthrop says.
The author, who has resided in Los Angeles for four years, spent fifteen years in South Beach. "On many levels, writing Ocean Drivewas the deepest, darkest, saddest most emotionally draining experience of my adult life. It was like a Catharsis."
Onwards, the author is finishing his third book, Somewhere in Hollywood, which he says, "Will be my biggest and best book." He is working with an entertainment attorney and agent to bring Ocean Drive to the screen. However, with a wry smile reveals a goal on his career bucket-list has always been, "To write for the CBS soap opera The Young & The Restless."
