An effervescent Tinseltown romp, crackling with atmosphere and nutty humor.
A fake mystery writer finds herself searching for stolen jewelry and missing—or possibly devoured—persons in exuberant 1937 Hollywood in this frothy period yarn.
When bestselling mystery writer Dame Alice Cartwright declines to traipse from the English Cotswolds to L.A. to do contracted rewrites of her Lady Irwin’s Diamonds screenplay, her New York publisher Dermot Delaney panics over the prospect of returning her $25,000 advance from the Farley Brothers studio. Fortunately, he hits upon the absurd workaround of sending office assistant Penelope Greenleigh to Hollywood, posing as the author, to do the rewrites. Arriving in L.A. as Dame Alice, sporting a gray wig, frumpy British tweeds, and an improvised English accent that doesn’t always obscure her Jersey roots, Penelope is whisked to the storied Chasen’s restaurant to hobnob with Hollywood stars, wannabes, and sharks, including Lady Irwin’s hack director, Skipper Farley; the picture’s vain star, Zsa Zsa Le Coque, currently carrying on an adulterous affair with Argentinian playboy Federico Fulco; and baleful gossip columnist Hattie Holiday, who immediately marks Penelope as an impostor. More panic ensues when Zsa Zsa disappears from Chasen’s along with the $30,000 Miramar Diamonds necklace used as the movie’s titular prop. Taking after Dame Alice, Penelope starts sleuthing, assisted by gal pal Molly Lopez, handsome Det. Jake Chu, pixilated oil heiress Emerald Elliman, and Skipper’s factotum, Toby, a teenage wunderkind who’s addressing Hollywood’s direst medical problems by inventing early versions of Botox, collagen lip injections, and Alka-Tonic, a hangover remedy made of 100 percent relabeled vodka. Penelope and her posse rummage through glitzy parties, swanky mansions, and the chic Beverly Hills Hotel in pursuit of the necklace but come up dry—until the real Dame Alice unexpectedly arrives and threatens to expose Penelope’s charade.
Journalist and author Mahoney provides a fun panorama of an old Hollywood that’s very much like a classic screwball comedy: glamorous, slightly tawdry, and full of glorious grifters remaking themselves from starry-eyed hicks into silver-screen deities. The cheerfully ridiculous plot makes no more sense than is necessary to keep the characters buzzing as they wander through Hollywood landmarks, spy Marx Brothers on the horizon, fend off the occasional mobster, theorize about a possible cannibal murder of a beer maker by a chowder manufacturer, and generally mill about firing witticisms at each other. Penelope is a passive heroine: She mainly plays straight woman to the colorful antics of the various supporting characters who dominate the plot until Dame Alice arrives to impart some direction to the narrative. Still, Mahoney’s whip-smart prose and sparkling dialogue supply plenty of entertainment, from bitchy repartee (“‘I’m 40 myself, though you’d probably never guess!’ offered Emerald merrily. ‘What birthday is coming up for you, Hattie—70? Or was that a few years ago?’”) to material-girl reverie (“‘There are some diamond mines and about a million acres of land,’ said Zsa Zsa, trying unsuccessfully to suppress the dollar signs which had appeared in her huge blue eyes. ‘But I love Federico for himself. I mean, he’s gorgeous’”), to droll suspense (“‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ I whispered. ‘That Morty chopped up Barry King, and turned him into soup?’ asked Molly. ‘You bet I am!’”). The result is a laugh-out-loud whodunnit that sends up Hollywood’s beguiling nonsense.
An effervescent Tinseltown romp, crackling with atmosphere and nutty humor.Pub Date: May 23, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 193
Publisher: Wrenfield Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.
In this mystery, the narrator constantly adds commentary on how the story is constructed.
In 1929, during the golden age of mysteries, a (real-life) writer named Ronald Knox published the “10 Commandments of Detective Fiction,” 10 rules that mystery writers should obey in order to “play fair.” When faced with his own mystery story, our narrator, an author named Ernest Cunningham who "write[s] books about how to write books," feels like he must follow these rules himself. The story seemingly begins on the night his brother Michael calls to ask him to help bury a body—and shows up with the body and a bag containing $267,000. Fast-forward three years, and Ernie’s family has gathered at a ski resort to celebrate Michael’s release from prison. The family dynamics are, to put it lightly, complicated—and that’s before a man shows up dead in the snow and Michael arrives with a coffin in a truck. When the local cop arrests Michael for the murder, things get even more complicated: There are more deaths; Michael tells a story about a coverup involving their father, who was part of a gang called the Sabers; and Ernie still has (most of) the money and isn’t sure whom to trust or what to do with it. Eventually, Ernie puts all the pieces together and gathers the (remaining) family members and various extras for the great denouement. As the plot develops, it becomes clear that there’s a pretty interesting mystery at the heart of this novel, but Stevenson’s postmodern style has Ernie constantly breaking the fourth wall to explain how the structure of his story meets the criteria for a successful detective story. Some readers are drawn to mysteries because they love the formula and logic—this one’s for them. If you like the slow, sometimes-creepy, sometimes-comforting unspooling of a good mystery, it might not be your cup of tea—though the ending, to be fair, is still something of a surprise.
This book and its author are cleverer than you and want you to know it.Pub Date: Jan. 17, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-06-327902-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
