City of Love

Investigative journalist Michael Bowker, 68, who writes on health, science and environmental issues, has written his first novel Gods of Our Time: A Paris Love Story and launched it with a bijou bash at Tecolote, the bustling bibliophile bastion in the upper village. It has now been optioned for a movie.

Michael, who lives in our Eden by the Beach and Placerville, has written 24 books and 4,500 articles, including for the L.A. Times, San Francisco Chronicle, and Readers Digest.

The new book transports readers to Paris in the 1920s, when artistic gods included Ernest Hemingway, Pablo Picasso and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and relates a torrid romance between a painter-healer and a journalist.