THE DEVIL YOU KNOW

In LAPD Det. Margaret Nolan’s third case, her personal demons finally take a back seat to the demons battening on a gallery of Hollywood types.

Disney star Evan Hobbes insists that the photos showing him in seriously compromising positions with young fans are deepfakes. The good news is that he’s soon proved correct: They’ve been produced by Brianna Cornish, who took $5,000 to sink his career. The bad news is that by the time the fakes are traced to her, Hobbes has been found dead in a rockslide following a party given by Disney exec David Baum and his wife, Essie, whose brother, Seth Lehman, is Hobbes’ agent. Things get worse for the Baums with the news that Hobbes, who richly deserved to die for earlier, less explicitly documented sins, was choked to death, and worse still when David is killed along with Kira Tanner, an aspiring actress in possession of a thumb drive that carried a good deal more blackmail material. It’s all business as usual for Lehman’s boss Rebecca Wodehouse, the Dragon Lady who presides over Wodehouse International Talent with such imperious hauteur that you’d never guess the agency her father launched will go broke unless they can replace soiled clients like Hobbes with the likes of A-list actress Daphna Love, who’s found her way back to the embraces of Sam Easton, Nolan’s friend and informal consultant. Tracy dishes enough dirt on her characters’ sordid pasts to make killers like Nolan and Easton seem tame. So many cast members come across as repellent that the big reveal is something of a letdown since they don’t all turn out to be guilty.

Who needs movies anyway when you have books as laden with dirty secrets as this one?