 |
A dead body, beautiful movie star, and shady business deals fall into the lap of reporter, Scott Warren, who gets caught up in a web of lies while visiting in LA. Hired by Tycoon Magazine to write a feature on Harold Stanton, Warren inadvertently stumbles onto an affair involving Stanton's wife and a younger man. When the younger man ends up dead, Warren delves deeper into the affair, the movie star Merle Stanton, and her Hollywood circle of friends. Through his investigative reporting and with the help of a few friends, Warren makes surprising discoveries, realizing that not everything is what it seems in a strange town where fiction meets reality. In typical Hollywood fashion, the LA police and detectives finally stage a big showdown to catch the murderer.
There's a lot happening in this quick read full of action, drama, and comedy. It calls to mind the glory days of the Hollywood studio pictures. Fans of noir Hollywood movies will appreciate O'Grady's story as this book resembles the old private eye novels and movies full of shadowy characters with interests of their own while trying to make it in a town as tough as LA. While O'Grady calls this work a short story, it seems a bit plot heavy and might be more comfortably labeled as a novella. It's originally part of a collection of four stories under the title, Bagatelles for a Masochist. It's worth checking out the other stories to see what they're about and how this offering fits into the collection. Bagatelles for a Masochist is also a 2014 finalist for The da Vinci Eye, an additional honor for distinctive cover artwork under The Eric Hoffer Award for independent books.