FROM CWA DAGGER AND DOUBLE McILVANNEY AWARD WINNER CRAIG RUSSELL COMES ANOTHER DARK, GRIPPING MASTERPIECE .

CRAIG RUSSELL is an award-winning Scottish author whose books have been translated into twenty-five languages.One villain is a woman of color, described in the most despicable stereotypical language; the other is disfigured . She knows the house and its scattered half-dozen neighbors are all less than a decade old, the blossoming of recently sown seeds of sudden wealth and confidence. Mary Rourke walks across to her, placing a hand on her shoulder to restrain the maid’s habit of subservience as she starts to rise from the chair.

Also wonderfully strange is a film professor's 1968 trip to an abandoned hotel in the middle of the Mojave where a copy of the film may be hidden.Well-drawn characters introduce the criminal underworld to the occult kind in a breathless and compelling plot. Then the POV goes back to win the movie was being shot at first glance it looks like the main actress has killed herself Mary Rourke who is a Hollywood fixer and helps clean up negative happenings thanks she was way too selfish for that and believes she was murdered and although she will try to keep it on the down low it seems everyone she talks to already knows about it. If it wasn’t for the murders, sensitive readers, the book would be a pleasure to read because of the writing! She is medium-height, slim and narrow waisted without being meager, her bust and hips fuller than the prevailing trend prefers; her dark hair beneath the navy felt cloche hat, too, is longer than is the current fashion and falls almost to her shoulders. Sit,” she says, and Conway isn’t sure if she is talking to him or the dog, but both obey simultaneously.

What fascinates him most is that hers is a face he knows so well—­not aged, as it is now, but in bygone, camera-­captured flawless youth. Ultimately, I feel this book could have benefitted from a more firm editor and the removal of a lot of the fluff, fancy words and excessive description to make the actual plot points easier to find and follow. Readers may feel a voyeuristic thrill as the names of Hollywood royalty — Clara Bow, John Barrymore, and Mary Pickford, among others — are dropped into scenes.It is, he thinks, like looking at some classical monument—­like the Acropolis, or the Sphinx of Giza—­where hints of the original, long-­distant splendor shine through the ravages of time. Now all that’s left at the site is a shell of a thriving town that could have once rivaled Hollywood, and it is here where Paul hopes to learn the whereabouts of the legendary lost film. I think giving these characters more depth and detail would have had a powerful impact on the conclusion. There’s also an interesting cast of characters, notably Mary Rourke who is the ‘fixer’ employed by the studio making the film.

The harsh, hot, bounded here-­and-­now of the room and the harsh, hot, boundless desert beyond is all there is. Even at this height the air hangs heavy and orange- grove-scent laden, like a perfumed cloak draped around the shoulders of the Santa Monica Mountains. This is a tremendous work of historical noir… The mastery of silent film history was also exceptional… Expertly written and plotted, this excellent novel is a deeply satisfying amalgam of mystery and horror.Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Prevention, Health, Washingtonian, and numerous other publications. We get an inside look of how the movie studios worked back then and how the police were often on their payroll. Flashback to 1927 Hollywood, where Mary Rourke works for the film studio Carbine International as a fixer, the person who cleans up the messes made by actors that could damage careers and business. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.