The Revenge of Kali-Ra
-
- $9.99
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
Nadia Wentworth is a Hollywood star. A big star. And she's so dreadfully bored on location in the South Pacific, she begins reading the first thing her assistant can dig up: a piece of gloriously bad pulp fiction by 1920s author Valerian Ricardo. Nadia soon falls under the spell of the bewitching Kali-Ra, the Queen of Doom, and knows she must portray the infamous character on the big screen.
Ecstatic, she hires a famous British screenwriter to pen the script, and as word leaks out, all sorts of pests start popping up, including: Ricardo's great grandnephew; his elderly "wife"; his biographer, who also happens to be an illegitimate granddaughter; and a gaggle of obsessed Ricardo fans. When someone is murdered, there are scads of suspects, a multitude of motives, and much mayhem in this delightful, laugh-out-loud farce from one of the most accomplished novelists in the genre.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Beck rightly dedicates this zany parody of 1920s exotic adventure fiction to Sax Rohmer, E. Phillip Oppenheim, the Baroness Orczy and their ilk, who created the genre. Movie superstar Nadia Wentworth reads The Wrath of Kali-Ra, written decades ago by the long-forgotten Valerian Ricardo, and determines to produce a film about the eponymous cruel dominatrix, Queen of Doom. Immediately, Nadia is besieged by a horde of greedy claimants to the Kali-Ra copyright and by others scrambling for a financial piece of the movie: Ricardo's possessive widow; his naive great-grandnephew; a scheming, possibly illegitimate granddaughter; an inquisitive academic authority on Ricardo; a luckless British screenwriter; a feckless lawyer representing a crook hiding in the Caribbean; an inept security adviser; a washed-up crooner with Mafia connections; and a mysterious "slave" of Kali-Ra. Melanie Oakley, Nadia's assistant, must sort through this dazzling hodgepodge and protect Nadia's project. Mistaken identity, accidents, fights, a stabbing and an abduction proceed apace, studded with hilarious excerpts from Ricardo's melodramatic novels. After a grand finale in which the copyright ownership is cleared and nearly all the characters pair off, readers will still be chuckling at this dead-on sendup of Hollywood and pulp fiction.
