Mr. CSI: How a Vegas Dreamer Made a Killing in Hollywood One Body at a Time

The creator of TV’s mega-popular CSI franchise, Zuiker brings his obvious skills as a writer to this memoir that will delight CSI fans. Zuiker begins with a death—the suicide of his father, who he hadn’t seen for 25 years, on the same night that CSI is receiving a People’s Choice Award and proceeds to skillfully weave his own upward struggle as a writer with his recollections and investigation of his father’s downward struggle as a fringe player in the Las Vegas gambling scene. Following his own dictum for the best CSI scripts—“The facts always told the best story”—Zuiker gives an unsentimental account of his father’s cruelty and desertion, his mother’s valiant attempts to keep going, and his own lively stories from his time as a bellman at the Mirage hotel in Vegas (Quentin Tarantino was a “good tipper”). But the book’s best section is his detailed account of the show’s creation, from his first attempts at screenwriting and his early research with Vegas CSI investigators, to how the show was picked up by CBS after being rejected by every other major network. (Jan.)