The Last Embrace
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Los Angeles 1949. A city of big dreams and dark shadows...
Lily Kessler, a former stenographer and spy for the OSS, comes to Los Angeles to find her late fiancé's sister Kitty, an actress who is missing from her Hollywood boardinghouse. The next day, Kitty's body is found in a ravine below the Hollywood sign. Unimpressed by the local police, Lily investigates on her own. As she delves into Kitty's life, she encounters fiercely competitive starlets, 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 L.A. can shift kaleidoscopically, and Lily begins to see how easily a young woman can lose her balance and fall prey to the alluring city's dangers....
With vibrant characters and unerring insight into the desires and dark impulses that can flare between men and women, 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lily Kessler, a former OSS officer, fearlessly treads Hollywood's meanest streets in search of her late fianc '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-m ch minor characters and some celluloid motivations, this torrid, down-and-dirty expos of the postwar entertainment industry includes enough special effects to make all that glitter look temporarily like 24-carat gold.
