The Hurricane Blonde
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
AN INSTANT USA TODAY BESTSELLER
"A murder mystery that feels as magnetic, timeless, and inextricable from Hollywood legend as the Black Dahlia . . . There's no one better at writing the dark side of Hollywood than Halley Sutton." —Ashley Winstead, author of In My Dreams I Hold a Knife
Salma Lowe, progeny of Hollywood royalty and a once-promising child actor, spends her days as a guide for the Stars Six Feet Under tour, leading tourists through Los Angeles’s star-studded avenues to sites where actresses of the past met untimely ends. Salma knows better than anyone that a tragic death is the surest path to stardom. Her sister, Tawney, viciously dubbed the "Hurricane Blonde," was murdered in the nineties, the case never solved and, to Salma’s ire, indefinitely closed . . . until Salma stumbles upon a dead body mid-tour, on the property where her sister once lived, at the precise scene of her sister’s demise. Even more uncanny: the deceased woman also looks like Tawney.
The police are convinced this woman’s death was an accident—but Salma is haunted by the investigation’s echoes of her own past. What if this woman’s murder points to Tawney’s killer? Launching her own investigation, Salma plunges back into the salacious but seductive world of Hollywood. And what she’ll find is that old secrets may just be worth killing for.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sutton's gritty sophomore effort (after 2020's The Lady Upstairs) immerses readers in the underbelly of Hollywood. Former child actor Salma Lowe has a past overloaded with trauma: her famous parents are philandering alcoholics; her beloved starlet sister, Tawney, was brutally murdered 20 years earlier; and Salma herself was raped as a teen, causing her to leave show business and fall into drug addiction. Now in recovery, Salma runs bus tours of places where famous women, including her sister, met tragic ends. But when Tawney's former fiancé, "the most dangerous director in Hollywood," begins filming a movie about Tawney, and Salma finds the lead actress drowned in the pool of Tawney's former home, her fragile sense of stability begins to crack. Sutton's prose can be overwrought ("Minutes slipped out of my clock and rearranged themselves into an internal logic that didn't have any use for time"), but she effectively conjures a seedy Los Angeles where directors exploit women, police disbelieve victims, and members of the press are soulless vipers. That atmosphere, plus intriguing true Hollywood lore about Marilyn Monroe, Sharon Tate, and other stars who've died tragically, keeps the pages turning. This is an acid-washed treat for fans of L.A. noir.
