The Wrong Girl
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
From critically acclaimed author Donis Casey comes the first in a vintage Hollywood mystery series! When a string of baffling clues leads to 1920s film star Bianca LaBelle, it looks like her dark secrets have finally come back to haunt her. Because the only thing worth more than wealth and fame is revenge…
Blanche Tucker longs to escape her drop-dead dull life in tiny Boynton, Oklahoma. Then a suave film producer roars into town. Graham Peyton is Blanche's ticket out of town—he can offer her a life of stardom in Beverly Hills. But the sleezy producer's offer is too good to be true, and once they get to California Blanche finds herself sold to a dangerous man. But she's determined to make a new life for herself, whatever the cost…
Six years later, Blanche has transformed into Bianca LaBelle, the reclusive and beloved film star. But when a private detective visits Bianca's mansion to ask her about remains found on a Santa Monica beach, it seems her shiny new life is going up in smoke. Peyton was murdered, and as this movie star mystery heats up, suspicion falls on the enigmatic Bianca. Did she make him pay for her private wrongs? With all of the twists and turns of a 1920s film, The Wrong Girl follows the daring exploits of a girl who chases her dream from the farm to old Hollywood, while showing just how risky—and rewarding—it can be to go off script.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Set mostly in Hollywood in 1926, this predictable series launch from Casey (the Alafair Tucker mysteries) introduces actor Bianca LaBelle, whose motion pictures about Bianca Dangereuse, "a Nelly Bly type journalist and adventurer" are "the biggest money-making movie franchise in the entire Western world." Bianca feels threatened after a private detective visits her at her Beverly Hills mansion to inquire about Graham Peyton, who went missing in 1921 and whose remains surfaced a week earlier on a Santa Monica beach. Bianca knows too much about Graham, who lured her to Hollywood with promises of stardom in 1920 when she was 15-year-old Blanche Tucker living in Boynton, Okla., but then sold her to a pimp from whom she later escaped. Despite the plot points of con men preying on young women, sexual abuse, ruthless mobsters, and drugs, the danger is as nonmenacing as that in Bianca's Perils of Pauline esque flicks. All that's missing from this melodrama is a mustache-twirling villain. Nevertheless, Casey's portrait of how stars were born and kept their status during Hollywood's silent era will intrigue film buffs.
