What with all my 'adventures' this summer it has taken me a long time to finish this book. It's pretty great. We have a murder mystery set in Hollywood just after WW2 when the communist witch hunts were just getting started. The entire book is an exercise in duplicity, or rather in detecting duplicity. There is some kind of underhanded business going on, possibly subversive, but really unknown because the key player is dead. Our hero gets to put the pieces together, but in true Hollywood fashion he doesn't figure it out until we get to the stereotypical Hollywood denouement: a bad guy emerges from the shadows with a gun, our hero looses his gun and the dame rescues him, or does she? These are the kinds of idiotic scenes I hate in the movies, but they seem to be required in any kind of action flick. But here I can forgive the author because we are so wrapped up in the movie making business it would be sacrilege to have it to wind up any other way.
This story has many great parts, mostly involved with the characters and their interactions. One thing that stuck out was whole communist witch hunt thing. I don't know how much trouble the commies ever caused in the USA, but the radical Muslims are demonstrating that secret organizations can make serious trouble. So if you are investigating someone for subversive and / or criminal activity, you want to do it quietly, not in front of a bunch of reporters and cameras. But if you are a politician, that is your meat and potatoes, so that's the way you do it.
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