The Beverly Malibu
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
On Thanksgiving Day, LAPD homicide detective Kate Delafield and her partner, Ed Taylor, are called to an apartment building on the edge of Beverly Hills to investigate a premeditated and pitiless murder.
No one appears particularly grieved by the shocking end to old-time Hollywood director Owen Sinclair. Surely not three other tenants of the Beverly Malibu, who worked in the motion picture industry during the blacklist years and loathed Sinclair for having been a "friendly witness" before the House Un-American Activities Committee.
Nor is Sinclair's latest ex-wife grieved or even his children. Nor film actress and former paramour Maxine Marlowe. Nor Dudley Kincaid, whose brilliant screenplay Sinclair stole. Nor landlady Hazel Turner, whose husband, Jerome, is deceased but not exactly gone...
Kate sifts through tantalizing clues: a set of handcuffs fastening the murdered man to his bed of death; an album of a Wagner opera; a bourbon bottle lightly dosed with arsenic; a silver frame missing its photo.
She is also in a quandary over her fascination with Paula Grant, who discovered the murdered man. Until she is suddenly confounded by a wholly new aspect of herself uncovered by Aimee Grant, Paula Grant's remarkably beautiful young niece...
A Kate Delafield Mystery Series Book 3.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this absorbing procedural, Forrest's intelligent, complex series heroine, LAPD homicide detective Kate Delafield, makes her first appearance in hardcover, investigating the Thanksgiving Day murder by strychnine poisoning of septuagenarian Owen Sinclair, a retired movie director. Suspecting a revenge killing, Kate learns that more than 30 years ago, in the '50s, Sinclair named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee, destroying countless careers and lives in Hollywood. Many of Sinclair's eccentric, film-world neighbors in his apartment building were affected by HUAC and had reason to kill him. Kate, a lesbian, is attracted to two beautiful women who are under suspicion, and as the investigation continues, she is warmly welcomed into the tenants' extended family, one of whom, she knows, is the merciless killer. In her look back at the McCarthy era, Forrest has created a restrained and compassionate portrait of a turbulent period in American history. Movie buffs as well as mystery fans will enjoy her book.
