Curtain Call

March 4, 2019
Actress Enora Andressen, the 39-year-old narrator of this melodramatic series launch from Hurley (the Joe Faraday detective series), is surprised to return to her posh London apartment and find Malo, her “impossibly handsome, impossibly difficult, and impossibly remote” 17-year-old son, with whom she has a strained relationship. Malo has been living in Sweden with his film director father and father’s starlet girlfriend. Meanwhile, Enora has recently been diagnosed with brain cancer. Life gets even more complicated when investigative journalist Mitch Culligan asks Enora to approach Hayden Prentice, a shady multimillionaire with whom she had a one-night stand in her youth, in order to find out whether he’s donating large sums to a political party. The intrigue is largely subordinate to arguments about such subjects as Brexit, Trump’s America, Britain’s immigration policy, and political corruption in general. Readers looking for page-turning thrills will be disappointed. Still, Enora is a sufficiently strong character to carry a series. Agent: Oli Munson, A.M. Heath (U.K.).

April 15, 2019
The author of the Joe Faraday mysteries introduces a new series protagonist, Enora Andresson, an actress who has been diagnosed with a potentially fatal brain tumor. As concerned as she is about that, Enora soon has something else to worry about. A journalist shows up on her doorstep asking for her help with a story he's working on, an expos� of a wealthy entrepreneur who once was involved in illegal drugs. Enora knew the man once upon a time, briefly but intimately, and the journalist is hoping she can fill in some details about the man's past. The problem is, Enora has some secrets of her own that she'd very much like to keep under wraps. This is a very strong series debut. Hurley's writing style is economical; rather than tell us everything we need to know about Enora up front, clogging the narrative with exposition, he reveals only a few key elements and lets us discover the substance of the character as we move through the story. An intriguing start to a promising new series from a writer with a proven track record.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)