Dream Town
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4.2 • 40 Ratings
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
It is New Year's Eve, 1952 in Los Angeles. Private Investigator, Aloysius Archer, is dining with his friend and rising Hollywood star, Liberty Callahan, when they're approached by Eleanor Lamb, a famous screenwriter, who would like to hire him as she suspects someone is trying to kill her.
A visit to Lamb's Malibu residence leaves Archer in no doubt of foul play when he's knocked unconscious entering the property, there's a dead body in the hallway and Eleanor seeming to have vanished. With the police now involved in the case, a close friend and colleague of Lamb's employs Archer to find out what's happened to Eleanor.
Archer's investigation will take him from the rich and dangerous LA to the seedy and even more dangerous side of the city where cops and crooks work hand in hand. He'll cross paths with Hollywood stars, politicians and notorious criminals. He'll almost die several times, and he'll discover bodies from the Canyon to the Malibu beaches.
And, with the help of Liberty and the infamous Willie Dash, he'll leave no stone unturned in trying to find out who Eleanor Lamb really was.
Because 1953 Hollywood is a place where you have to survive regardless of who has to be sacrificed to get there.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
The hero of David Baldacci’s noir series, WWII veteran turned private investigator Aloysius Archer, has seen more in his 30 years than most men do in a lifetime. In his third outing he steps into the 1950s and onto the streets of Los Angeles, where a chance encounter with a screenwriter leads him down the path of another harrowing murder investigation. The narrative moves swiftly and effortlessly, propelled by well-tuned action and a weighty emotional undercurrent. Baldacci is clearly revelling in the glamour and intrigue of his Hollywood setting with Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra and Clark Gable all name-checked in the first chapter alone. Impressively suspenseful, Dream Town is sure to delight fans of Baldacci and Hollywood noir alike.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Bestseller Baldacci's welcome third outing for PI Aloysius Archer (after 2021's A Gambling Man) takes Archer, a decorated WWII vet who works for a detective agency in Bay Town, Calif., to Los Angeles to celebrate New Year's Eve 1952 with actress and love interest Liberty Callahan. That evening, at a restaurant frequented by such stars as Frank Sinatra and Groucho Marx, Callahan introduces Archer to her friend Eleanor Lamb, a screenwriter working on a script for Bette Davis. After Lamb learns of Archer's profession, she seeks to hire him because she's gotten middle-of-the-night–hang-up calls, and someone entered her Malibu home and left a bloody knife in her kitchen sink. Lamb's fears for her life seem justified when she disappears. Right after Archer finds an unknown man shot to death in her house, someone bludgeons the gumshoe into unconsciousness. The tension rises as his subsequent investigation places his own life in danger. Baldacci can be a bit overfond of similes and metaphors (ocean breakers hurl "their sound tentacles"), but otherwise solid prose nicely evokes the traditional hard-boiled whodunit. Raymond Chandler fans will be entertained.
