Author: Barbara Hambly

A- #BookReview: The Keep of Dare: Further Adventures by Barbara Hambly

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A- Reviews> book reviews
A- #BookReview: The Keep of Dare: Further Adventures by Barbara HamblyThe Keep of Dare: Further Adventures by Barbara Hambly
Format: ebook
Source: purchased from Amazon
Formats available: ebook
Genres: Dark Fantasy, epic fantasy, fantasy
Pages: 174
Published by Barbara Hambly on 2015-2018
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads

Pretty Polly: The Keep of Dare is an enclosed fortress: no one knows all its secrets and corners. When people start disappearing, the Archmage Ingold Inglorion and his two Californian companions - warrior Gil Patterson and novice wizard Rudy Solis - are faced with the possibility that some deadly entity is hiding in the darkness of the Keep. And the situation is not improved when Ingold himself disappears.

Whisper: The teleporter is due to open between the Keep of Dare and an unknown Keep, lost for three thousand years - and Archmage Ingold Inglorion is snowed in fifty miles away and unable to be there to deal with whatever might be on the other side of that teleporter. California warrior-woman Gil Patterson, and California mage-in-training Rudy Solis, have to explore the unknown Keep on their to interpret its secrets, to prevent whatever might lurk there from following them back to the last Keep of humankind... and to destroy it when, in spite of their efforts, it does.

Elsewhere: The builders of the ancient Keep of Dare communicated with other Keeps via a transporter – whose instruction manual unfortunately did not survive the centuries. Thus, Archmage Ingold Inglorion – the only trained wizard in the Keep – and his warrior-woman partner Gil Patterson of California find themselves in what they suspect is an unknown world, with no idea how to return home, while an army of deadly ghosts starts to appear within the Keep itself.

The Dreamers of Black Rock: The wizards at the distant Keep of Black Rock have disappeared. Warrior woman Gil Patterson, the wizard Ingold Inglorion, and Ingold’s pupil Rudy Solis set out to learn what happened to them – but only Gil manages to arrive at Black Rock Keep. Something caused the mages of Black Rock – and Ingold and Rudy, when they drew near to the half-ruined Keep – to lose their magic, before they disappeared, and Gil senses that something deeper and stranger still is going on. But whatever it is, she has to figure it out alone.

My Review:

Worldcon opens today in Los Angeles and Barbara Hambly is one of the Guests of Honor. I still have fond, in fact extremely fond, memories of Hambly’s Darwath trilogy, which I read when it came out back in the early 1980s. I still have my paperbacks, and the original cover of the first book, The Time of the Dark, is every bit as arresting as it was back then.

Because that cover, featured at left, showed a Gandalf-type wizard in full wizarding garb sitting at what was obviously an already old kitchen table in a run-down apartment holding a can of beer. A CAN of beer, not a mug or a stein or a horn, but an actual aluminum can of beer. WITH a bag of potato chips at his feet.

These things do not – and did not at the time – go together. I HAD to read this book. And I did. And every book that followed.

The ending of the original Darwath trilogy in The Armies of Daylight was a scene that stuck with me, not just the gist of it but the actual words, for decades. Because it was about a light shining in a neverending darkness, about giving a woman the choice to walk into danger instead of protecting her “for her own good” when it was really about protecting himself, and because it ended in a romance of equals that began as anything but.

But the trilogy ended in 1983 with The Armies of Daylight. The series as a whole drew to a close after two sequels, Mother of Winter and Icefalcon’s Quest, in 1996.

Or so I thought.

In my search for something of the author’s to read for Worldcon, I discovered that she was every bit as attached to her characters as her readers, and that she had written short stories set in several of the worlds of her classic fantasy, set after their happy ever afters. In the case of Darwath , that would be after the happy for now, because Darwath is a place where tomorrow is even less promised to anyone than most.

Which is how I found these stories, set in one of the few remaining human habitations in Darwath, the Keep of Dare. As much as I wondered if I could get back into a place and a series that I last read THIRTY years ago, I absolutely could not resist diving in to discover how Ingold Inglorion, Gil Patterson, and Rudy Solis were managing after surviving the end of the world as they knew it.

And I’m glad I did, even though I’m stuck dealing with the book hangover all over again.

Escape Rating A-: I’ve ALWAYS wondered what happened to Ingold, Gil, Rudy and his love, Alde after the end of The Armies of Daylight. ALWAYS. Finding that these Further Adventures existed was such a treat. At the same time, I did wonder whether I could fall back in after so many years, and I’m happy that the answer turned out to be an enthusiastic YES!

So this was certain a case of the right book at the right time.

In the case of this particular series, I wondered what an epilogue or “further adventures would actually look like for this particular series. These further adventures take place after the world has ended – and the people in it have to do their best to survive in conditions that would make most of us give up the ghost.

Which might not be an exit, as the Keep of Dare is filled with actual ghosts.

So the novelettes that tell the tale of these further adventures, Pretty Polly, Whisper, Elsewhere and The Dreamers of the Black Rock, are all stories of endurance wrapped around characters who have already endured a great deal and know that they can’t stop. While they know there’s a light at the end of this deep, dark tunnel, they also know that none of them will live to see it. Their job is to protect the remainder of humanity and teach the next generation the skills they will need to endure and survive.

A lot of the dramatic tension in the individual stories combines an environment that really is out to get them while dealing with the idiocy and/or unthinking privilege of people who still don’t believe the rules apply to them. Not even the rules keeping everyone alive.

Many of the dangers they face are monstrous or supernatural, particularly in Whisper and The Dreamers of Black Rock. The other two stories (Pretty Polly and Elsewhere) deal more with the stupidity of old powers and dead privilege in a situation where everyone needs everyone else desperately and there is no rescue coming except from each other. And that the old equations of power by inheritance or violence or money have given way to a different equation where power accrues to the ones who are keeping everyone alive.

No one is reading these for a happy ending, then again, they shouldn’t be because that’s not Darwath at all. It’s always been a story about a few desperate people fighting the only fight left to them against terrible odds, and getting up the next morning and doing it again.

Love doesn’t conquer all, but it holds out a hand when the night gets dark that another can cling to. It’s not even about the great and often insane romance between the old wizard and the misplaced scholar, although that’s there too. (And I was happy to see that it’s working out for them as well as could possibly be expected in their terrible circumstances.)

It’s a story about keeping a candle burning in the darkest night, and it caught me by the heart and the throat as much now as it did all those years ago. I’m glad I turned back to see that their candle is still burning.

#BookReview: Saving Susy Sweetchild by Barbara Hambly

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | B Reviews> book reviews
#BookReview: Saving Susy Sweetchild by Barbara HamblySaving Susy Sweetchild (Silver Screen Historical Mystery #3) by Barbara Hambly
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Silver Screen Historical Mystery #3
Pages: 293
Published by Severn House on September 3, 2024
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Welcome to Hollywood of the 1920 a world filled with glamour, fake names . . . and the occasional felony!

July, 1924. After nine months of living in Hollywood and working as a companion to her beautiful silent-movie star sister-in-law, young British widow Emma Blackstone is settling into her new doctoring film scenarios whenever the regular scenarist is overwhelmed with work, which seems to be most of the time.

Shoots for the Western movie Our Tiny Miracle are in full swing, with little seven-year-old Susy Sweetchild playing the lead and acting most professionally. Maybe too professionally, Emma thinks, shocked to the core when the child star is nearly killed in a stunt scene and her mother - former screen siren Selina Sutton - seems only to care that Susy gets the job done.

But Emma's concerns only worsen when news reaches her that Susy and her mother have been kidnapped. The ransom note says to keep the cops out of it, so it's up to Emma and Kitty to find them before the unthinkable happens and Emma is forced to rewrite Our Tiny Miracle with a far more tragic ending . . .

New York Times bestselling author Barbara Hambly once again brings the glamour and intrigue of Hollywood to life! An unputdownable mystery for fans of female-fronted historical mysteries set in the roaring twenties.

My Review:

Emma Blackstone, after nearly a year in Hollywood as her sister-in-law’s friend, confidant, dog handler and general factotum, as well as serving as a script doctor for Foremost Studios for almost as long, has learned the way that things work in Hollywood – no matter how often she wishes she didn’t.

Because she sees entirely too much, and is all too aware that she can’t fix ANY of it. Although she certainly does what she can, as shown in the first two books in the Silver Screen Historical Mysteries, Scandal in Babylon and One Extra Corpse.

But Susy Sweetchild’s situation still pierces her straight to the heart. Because the child is clearly – and justifiably – frightened to death. And is just as clearly aware that no one can help her or save her no matter how much they want to.

It’s 1924, and Hollywood is still the ‘Wild West’ when it comes to rules and regulations. Prohibition is in full swing, but bootlegged booze is openly everywhere. OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, won’t exist for another 45 years and child actors like Susy have no rights whatsoever – not even to the money they make.

Especially not to the money they make.

Susy is only seven years old, she’s one of Foremost Pictures biggest moneymakers, and she’s supporting her stage mother, her alcoholic father, her mother’s business manager and her mother’s succession of lovers and THEIR failed businesses as well as her father’s drinking habit. And quite possibly the partridge in the pear tree.

The only person on Susy’s side is her cat Mr. Gray, and poor Mr. Gray is even more of a hostage than she is. If Susy ‘misbehaves’ in any way, Mr. Gray is done for. And Susy is all too aware of the threat.

Possibly so is Mr. Gray. The cat seems both smart and sober, which is more than can be said for a lot of the humans in this story.

Emma would like to rescue Susy, but she has entirely too many hostages to fortune of her own to step that far out of line. She also knows it won’t do any good, as the powers that be in Los Angeles are all too aware of the side on which their bread is buttered, and that the studios are the ones doing the buttering.

But the status quo of Susy’s dreadful situation and anyone’s ability to help her out of it goes from bad to worse when the child star and her mother are kidnapped, along with Mr. Gray – a ginormous clue that should have occurred to more people an awful lot sooner.

Someone is extorting $100,000 from the studio for Susy’s safe return. (That’s something like $18,000,000 in today’s dollars!) There are multiple ransom notes being delivered, quite possibly from multiple sources. The police are not involved in the case, but the gossip columnists and the bootleggers are.

Considering how frequently the adults – including Emma and her Scooby Gang – are misdirected, as reluctant as the studio is to pay all that money to rescue a child star who is rapidly growing out of her cute and winsome phase, it looks like the princess is going to have to rescue herself in this one.

Escape Rating B: There are two stories going on in Saving Susy Sweetchild, and I have to admit that one interested me considerably more than the other.

The first is, of course, the mystery of who kidnapped Susy Sweetchild and whether the poor child can be found before it’s too late. The investigation of Susy’s abduction and ransom is the stuff of which Keystone Cops movies were made. No one covers themselves in glory in this part of the story – either because they are in on it, they intend to exploit its outcome, because they’ve been paid to look the other way or merely because they are simply incompetent but photogenic at the job they’re supposed to do.

Emma at least has a damn good excuse for not catching on right away – she’s not a professional detective, either police or private. It isn’t her job – she just cares about the kid and wants to help her.

But underneath – although often in plain sight – is the glimpse under the glitter and tinsel of Hollywood in the mid-1920s, before the Hays Code crackdown on ‘immorality’, before the talkies, and before the Great Depression.

We still read horrific stories about the treatment of child actors in Hollywood, and a lot of those stories are terrible to children and other living creatures. Susy will probably remind a lot of people of Shirley Temple, but by Temple’s time 15 years later, the situation had actually gotten a bit better. For select versions of ‘better’. Maybe less awful.

One of Susy Sweetchild’s contemporaries would have been another child actor named Jackie Coogan – who might be more familiar to readers as Uncle Fester in the 1960s Addams Family TV series. His relevance to Susy Sweetchild is that It was his lawsuit against his own mother in 1938, after he turned 21 and discovered that his mother had squandered his entire fortune, that finally put laws in place about the treatment of child actors AND the provision to put a portion of their income in trust for their adulthood.

All of the above tells readers that as much as I was following Susy’s fictional case, it was the factual underpinnings that truly had my attention for much of the story. The split in my attention wasn’t great for my absorption in Susy’s actual story, but the research dive was a lot of fun.

Howsomever, I did love the ending of Susy’s story. She was pretty much the only person who deserved a happy ending, and I was very relieved to see that she – and Mr. Gray – got exactly what they deserved – as did a whole lot of others who deserved something considerably less…happy.

Review: One Extra Corpse by Barbara Hambly + Giveaway

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> Blogo-Birthday> Blogoversary> book reviews> Giveaways
Review: One Extra Corpse by Barbara Hambly + GiveawayOne Extra Corpse (Silver Screen Historical Mystery #2) by Barbara Hambly
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Silver Screen Historical Mystery #2
Pages: 256
Published by Severn House on March 7, 2023
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org, Better World Books
Goodreads

Hollywood intrigue, glamor . . . and murder: Enter the roaring twenties in this thrilling Silver Screen historical mystery, starring two very different female sleuths.
May, 1924. It's been seven months since young British widow Emma Blackstone arrived in Hollywood to serve as companion to Kitty Flint: her beautiful, silent-movie star sister-in-law. Kitty is generous, kind-hearted . . . and a truly terrible actress. Not that Emma minds; she's too busy making her academic parents turn in their graves with her new job writing painfully historically inaccurate scenarios for Foremost Studios, in between wrangling their leading lady out of the arms of her army of amorous suitors.
So when one of Kitty's old flames, renowned film director Ernst Zapolya, calls Emma and tells her it's imperative he meet with Kitty that morning, she's not surprised. Until, that is, he adds that lives depend on it. Ernest sounds frightened. But what can have scared him so badly - and what on earth does cheerful, flighty Kitty have to do with it?
Only Ernest can provide the answers, and Kitty and Emma travel to the set of his extravagant new movie to find them. But the shocking discovery they make there only raises further questions . . . including: will they stay alive long enough to solve the murderous puzzle?

My Review:

One Extra Corpse, like its predecessor Scandal in Babylon, strips away the phony tinsel of Hollywood to find the real dirty, bloody tinsel underneath.

It’s 1924, just one month after the events of the first book in the Silver Screen Historical Mystery series, Emma Blackstone has mostly settled herself into her new life in Hollywood as her movie star sister-in-law’s general factotum and keeper of all secrets as well as caretaker of both Kitty Flint AND her three pampered Pekingese dogs, Chang Ming, Black Jasmine, and Buttercreme.

Managing Kitty also comes with a bit of tinsel-making of Emma’s own. She’s regularly employed – and sometimes just plain used – as a scene doctor for movie scripts during these frenetic-paced early days of the silver screen – and occasionally as a social prop for a gay actor who needs to be seen with a woman to protect his image.

Days that may be silent on film but are filled with noise, chatter and above all gossip behind the scenes. Gossip that all too frequently includes who’s sleeping with whom this week – as opposed to last week or next week – as the star-making machinery of Hollywood seems to be fueled by equal parts sex and addiction.

The addiction of entirely too many actors to their drugs of choice – frequently provided by their studios, the addiction of the studios to making money and controlling their actors so that they can keep making that money, and the addiction of the general public to movies as well as gossip about their favorite stars.

No one wants a dead body on the set, not when that dead body belongs to a big name movie director and when it’s all too clear that the man was murdered. Quite possibly by his over-acting, downright histrionic current wife. Who had plenty of motives and no alibi.

But she’s a star in her own right, and her studio doesn’t want to ruin her box-office potential. She makes them too much money to be a murderer, and the police have been paid plenty to make sure she doesn’t get labeled as one. The studios have handed the police a neat-and-tidy case with a tailor-made perpetrator. They can afford to sacrifice an extra to keep one of their stars out of trouble.

Which is where Emma and Kitty get themselves involved. They were on the scene because the victim had something important he wanted to tell Kitty. Who was one of his many, many ex-lovers, just as he was one of hers. Of course, he was killed before he could tell them whatever-it-was, otherwise there wouldn’t be a case to investigate.

And there so very much is. Not the case of a jealous wife, tempting though it was. Or at least Emma is sure that isn’t the solution – not when the Bureau of Investigation (the FBI before it became the FBI) seems to have searched Kitty’s house looking for something, and mysterious thugs make multiple attempts to murder one or both of them.

All while a desperate young woman is on the hook for a murder that she couldn’t possibly have committed. Or could she?

Escape Rating A: This was surprisingly meaty for a book whose cover kind of screams camp with vamp, but then, the silent movie era did have to maximize flash and style to convey emotion. After all, the characters couldn’t use their own words, or even the scriptwriter’s words.

What makes this story so good, and kind of rocks the reader on their heels at the end, is the way that it gets deep into how the sausage-machine of moviemaking worked then – and probably still does now to a greater extent than we like to think about while we’re watching the latest hit.

This story looks hard at the human cost of all that “entertainment”. When that director is killed on set, he dies in the middle of directing a climactic battle scene in his last picture. A scene that uses real bullets fired hopefully above the heads of real people while the inevitable stampeding horses are harnessed into a rig that is guaranteed to bring them down in a crash of heavy bodies on spindly legs that will look great on film. That some of those extras will need to be carried off on stretchers, and that some of the horses will be crippled and shot afterwards, is considered just part of the cost of making movies.

Nobody cares who or how many die as long as it can be hushed up and the show goes on. Which is what the case turns out to be all about in the end.

But it middles in a whole lot of the real issues of the time, in Hollywood and elsewhere. Particularly, in this case, the growing “Red Scare” about communism and socialism in Hollywood, and the lengths the government will go to suppress it, the adults who briefly flirted with it in their misspent youths will go to escape their pasts, and how far some will go to keep their secrets – or the secrets of their own, currently imploding, government.

As the story whipsaws the reader back and forth from the froth of Hollywood to the hamfisted murder investigation to the all-too-real threats to Emma’s and Kitty’s life and liberty, it’s impossible to stop turning pages to find out not just whodunnit but what they done and why they did it.

Most people read mysteries for what has been called “the romance of justice”, that guarantee that good will triumph and evil will get its just desserts. One Extra Corpse doesn’t deliver on the whole of that promise, but it delivers as much justice as was possible and definitely satisfies in that delivery just the same.

~~~~~~ GIVEAWAY ~~~~~~

Today is the first day of Reading Reality’s Blogo-Birthday Celebration Week. There will be giveaways every day this week, and I wanted to get the week started with a real bang.

Barbara Hambly is an author who I’ve been reading and following for more than 40 years, since her first book, The Time of the Dark. Over those decades she has written epic fantasy, urban fantasy, paranormal that verges on horror, and historical mystery. While I haven’t read EVERYTHING she’s ever written, I’ve read and loved some of everything she’s turned her hand to, and am looking forward to more to come as I expect Emma and Kitty have plenty more cases coming in their future. At least I certainly hope so.

As is my custom, TWELVE YEARS now and counting, I’m giving things away for this combined blogoversary and birthday week. Today’s giveaway is the winner’s choice of any one of Barbara Hambly’s books, in any format, up to $30 (US) so that includes One Extra Corpse.

Good luck with today’s giveaway and remember that there’s more to come!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Review: Scandal in Babylon by Barbara Hambly

Posted on by Marlene Harris | Author : | A Reviews> book reviews
Review: Scandal in Babylon by Barbara HamblyScandal in Babylon by Barbara Hambly
Format: eARC
Source: supplied by publisher via NetGalley
Formats available: hardcover, paperback, ebook, audiobook
Genres: historical fiction, historical mystery, mystery
Series: Silver Screen Historical Mystery #1
Pages: 240
Published by Severn House Publishers on September 7, 2021
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads


"You shall never have a penny of my money. Leave me alone or I will shoot you dead!"

1924. After six months in Hollywood, young British widow Emma Blackstone has come to love her new employer, glamourous movie-star Kitty Flint - even if her late husband's sister is one of the worst actresses she's ever seen. Looking after Kitty and her three adorable Pekinese dogs isn't work Emma dreamed of, but Kitty rescued her when she was all alone in the world. Now, the worst thing academically-minded Emma has to worry about is the shocking historical inaccuracies of the films Kitty stars in.
Until, that is, Rex Festraw - Kitty's first husband, to whom she may or may not still be married - turns up dead in her dressing room, a threatening letter seemingly from Kitty in his pocket.
Emma's certain her flighty but kind-hearted sister-in-law has been framed. But who by? And why? From spiteful rivals to jealous boyfriends, the suspects are numerous. But as Emma investigates, she begins to untangle a deadly plot - and there's something Kitty's not telling her . . .
This gripping first in a brand-new series from NYT-bestselling author Barbara Hambly brings the sights and sounds of Hollywood to life and is a perfect pick for fans of female-fronted historical mysteries set in the roaring twenties.

My Review:

Welcome to Hollywood, circa 1924, in the heady days before the content crackdown of the Hays Code, and just a few short years before Al Jolson’s famous line in the original Jazz Singer, when the audience first heard an actor in a movie say, “You ain’t heard nothin’ yet.”

Movies may not talk yet, but everyone in the movie industry, from the gossip columnists to the extras, certainly has plenty to say. And as our story begins, they’re all saying it about silent screen temptress Kitty Flint – better known to her legions of fans as Camille de la Rose.

Kitty’s sister-in-law, the young widow Emma Blackstone, isn’t so much a fan as she is a personal assistant, general factotum and confidant to the woman who rescued her from desperation in the form of serving as a paid companion to an ill-tempered, irascible old woman who was driving Emma into an early grave. Literally.

After six months in Tinseltown with Kitty, Emma isn’t sure whether she’s happy or not, fulfilled or not, or content or not, but she’s sure that Kitty needs her and that taking care of Kitty and her three spoiled Pekingese, writing last-minute scene treatments for Kitty’s movies, has both exhausted her and given her a new lease on life.

At least until someone ends up dead in Kitty’s dressing room, with Kitty unwilling to reveal her alibi – probably because she was two-timing at least two of her powerful and well-heeled lovers with a handsome stagehand. Or so Emma believes, because that’s par for Kitty’s behavior even at the best of times – which this certainly is not.

The dead body belongs to Kitty’s long-absent husband. Or possibly her ex-husband. But whether or not a divorce ever occurred is not the biggest problem that Kitty has to deal with when it comes to her first husband’s death.

He died in her dressing room. He was shot with her gun. She has no alibi. When the police discover sloppily concealed threatening letters between Kitty and Rex, it’s a foregone conclusion that Kitty will be arrested for his murder.

The gossip columnists are going to have a field day. The fire-and-brimstone preaching protestors that surround the studio thank heaven for the ammunition in their fight to censor the movie industry. Kitty’s rivals start circling her like sharks who have spotten chum in the water.

But Emma isn’t so sure that the whole thing adds up nearly as well as the corrupt and incompetent police would like to believe it does. The setup for the crime is meticulously planned. The execution of the crime – and of Rex Festraw – is incredibly sloppy. It doesn’t make sense that Kitty did it, to the point where any competent lawyer is going to get her off – if this case ever comes to trial.

It’s a magician’s trick. Distract the audience with something big and flashy over here, so no one looks at what’s really going on behind the curtain – or under the hat – or being pulled from the magician’s sleeves.

It’s up to Emma to figure out just who the magician is behind this particular trick and why they are out for Kitty – before it’s too late.

Hollywood movie studios, 1922

Escape Rating A: Scandal in Babylon is simply a delicious read on so many levels. It’s such a juicy, gossipy story, and even if all the characters are fiction, it’s impossible not to wonder if they’re more “fictionalized” than truly imaginary. Certainly there were plenty of real-life scandals in Hollywood in the 1920s, and every decade thereafter, to make this fictional portrayal of that imaginary world wrapped in a fake world keeping the real world at bay feel, well, real.

Emma and Kitty are both survivors, and that’s a big chunk of what bonds their relationship. Emma is English, grew up in the household of an Oxford don, assisted her father with his research into ancient civilizations, attended Oxford herself and planned to follow in her father’s footsteps. Then the war happened and the flu epidemic of 1918 followed on its heels. By the time Emma recovered from her illness her young husband was dead on the battlefields, as was her brother, and her parents were carried off by the flu. She was alone and destitute, the last survivor of a veritable shipwreck that took her family and her future.

Kitty ran away from home, a wild child who made terrible choices in men and jobs and everything else but who kept picking herself up and reinventing herself until she found Hollywood – the ultimate reinvention machine.

Emma and Kitty are holding each other up in more ways than one. But it’s clear that Emma is the brains of this outfit, and it’s her brain that’s needed. She’s the first person who sees the puzzle, and she’s the one who eventually solves it.

But as fascinating as the mystery is – and it certainly is that, complete with oodles of misdirection and a whole net full of tasty red herrings – it’s the portrait of Hollywood in the 1920s, as the star making machinery is being exploited and invented with each new day and new film and new star that makes this story sing and dance.

Even if Kitty can do neither. She doesn’t really need to. Movies haven’t become talkies yet. And whatever Kitty lacks in acting talent, she makes up for in sheer star power. Kitty has “It” whatever “It” is. It’s up to Emma to make sure that she gets to keep it.

One last thing – as I was reading Scandal in Babylon, and wading through all the many scandalous events it touches on, there were three books that it reminded me of, one of which I had to hunt for a bit.

Even though it’s a different war and a different aftermath, Emma Blackstone and Gwen Bainbridge from The Right Sort of Man by Allison Montclair would have gotten along like a house on fire. A Touch of Stardust by Kate Alcott, is set more than a decade later during the filming of Gone with the Wind, but it has a similar feel to it. A story about Tinseltown and its scandals and gossips, as seen through the eyes of someone close to the action but not directly a part of it. And last but not least, The Pirate King by Laurie R. King, set in the same period as Scandal in Babylon and displaying the rackety nature of the fledgling movie industry while murder travels in the wake of an utterly farcical production. One even more farcical, in its way, than the historical farce, Temptress in Babylon, that Kitty is filming.

Scandal in Babylon is billed as the first book in a new Silver Screen Historical Mystery series. While this particular case is over, the way that the story wraps up does leave room for Emma to find herself in the middle of another investigation. And I certainly hope that turns out to be the case!