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From Denise Hamilton, who has been hailed as "one of today's must-read writers" (Lee Child), comes a sexy, atmospheric, and seductive thriller set in 1949 Los Angeles, inspired by classic noir literature and a true unsolved crime.
Lily Kessler, a former stenographer and spy for the OSS, is asked by her late fiancé's mother to find out what happened to his sister Kitty, an actress who is missing from her Hollywood boardinghouse. Although the aspiring starlets at the house insist that Kitty is off somewhere furthering her career, her body is found the next day in a ravine below the Hollywood sign. Unimpressed by the local police, Lily investigates on her own.
As Lily delves further into Kitty's life, she encoun-ters fiercely competitive actors, gangsters, an eccentric special-effects genius, exotic denizens of Hollywood's nightclubs, and a homicide detective who might distract her from her quest for justice. But the landscape in burgeoning postwar Los Angeles can shift kaleido-scopically, and Lily begins to see how easily a young woman can lose her balance and fall prey to the alluring city's dangers....
With a vibrant cast of memorable characters, unerring insight into the desires and dark impulses that can flare between men and women, and a riveting narrative that builds to a stunning conclu-sion, The Last Embrace showcases Denise Hamilton at the height of her storytelling powers as she transports readers to a fascinating, transitional time in one of America's most beguiling cities.
Lily Kessler, a former OSS officer, fearlessly treads Hollywood's meanest streets in search of her late fiancé's actress sister, Kitty Hayden, who's gone missing while seeking juicy parts and wealthy lovers, in this evocative stand-alone set in 1949 from Hamilton (Prisoner of Memory and four other Eve Diamond thrillers). Soon after moving into Kitty's grungy boarding house, Lily learns Kitty's been murdered, like the famous "Black Dahlia" not long before, and she puts all her skills-intuition, deduction, inference and logic-into unraveling the crime. Gang wars, police corruption, shady reporters and a passionate new love interest, Det. Stephen Pico, can't stop Lily. Despite some papier-mâché minor characters and some celluloid motivations, this torrid, down-and-dirty exposé of the postwar entertainment industry includes enough special effects to make all that glitter look-temporarily-like 24-carat gold. (July)
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| $99.99 | Digital |
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Paul De Groot
reviewed The Last Embrace on July 28, 2008 The Last Embrace
By THOMAS PERRY
In 2001, an editor at Scribner sent me the manuscript of a first novel called TheJasmine Trade by a Los Angeles Times reporter named Denise Hamilton. It was an intriguing, contemporary story built around some Asian teenagers whose parents left them on their own in San Marino mansions while they returned to distant countries to run their businesses. I wrote an enthusiastic endorsement. Since then, there have been four more well-received novels and an anthology called Los Angeles Noir. So I didn't open Hamilton's new book, The Last Embrace,without expectations.
In it, Hamilton resuscitates one of the great, enduring fictional situations, the one in which a lone, mysterious stranger shows up in a small town and begins asking questions about a missing person. It's the plot of Bad Day at Black Rock and of High Plains Drifter. Only in Hamilton's rendition, both the stranger and the victim are beautiful young women, and the corrupt, cowardly little town is Hollywood.
It's October 1949. After the long trip from Champaign, Illinois, Lily Kessler steps off a train at Union Station, looking like one of the legion of pretty, naive newcomers seeking an acting career. She's actually something else, a woman who spent the war in Europe spying for the OSS, and she has the skills of an investigator, the persistence of a termite and a sacred trust to fulfill. The mother of her fiancé, an OSS officer killed in Europe, has asked her to find her only remaining child, an actress called Kitty Hayden, who left her boarding house one night and didn't return.
Read the rest of Thomas Perry's review here:
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