Brazen

September 5, 2016
In Estleman’s entertaining fifth Valentino novel (after Shoot), film archivist Valentino uses his extensive knowledge of the minutiae of Hollywood history to help Lt. Ray Padilla of the LAPD track down a bizarrely motivated serial killer. It is Valentino who realizes that the first death, that of his friend Beata Limerick, is not an accident, and who recognizes that the murders are being staged to
re-create the final moments of several blond-bombshell actresses of yesteryear who met untimely ends. The investigation is too often subordinate to snippets of information about iconic film stars and anecdotes of incidents from Hollywood’s glamorous past. This makes the story less compelling as a standard mystery, as does the killer remaining offstage for most of the book. Still, many readers will find the setting and the extensive dipping into movie trivia great fun. The convoluted plot hustles along, and Valentino and Padilla are well-realized individuals, as are the secondary characters introduced along the way. Agent: Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary Agency.

October 1, 2016
Who says blondes have more fun? Certainly not the three women who are killed in unnervingly precise restagings of the death scenes of real-life Hollywood blondes.From the very first murder, the case strikes home for Valentino, the UCLA film preservationist whose mission in life, restoring The Oracle to its former glory as a movie palace, keeps getting derailed by homicides (Shoot, 2016, etc.). Thats because the victim is his friend Beata Limerick, a starlet who bowed out of the movies when she married the much older businessman Pietro Jacobelli, who left her widowed and wealthy and with a healthy respect for the curse of blonde leading ladies dead before their time but wasnt around to keep her from being force-fed an overdose of Nembutal while a recording of Diamonds Are a Girls Best Friend plays over and over in the background. Lt. Ray Padilla, Valentinos LAPD frenemy, is ready to call the apparent suicide a murder, but he resists the Monroe parallels for three daysuntil Karen Ogilvie, another ex-actress married to a major UCLA film preservation donor, is killed in a manner that immediately recalls the death of Thelma Todd. Nor does his gender protect female impersonator Geoffrey Root from a staged car accident that screams Jayne Mansfield. Padilla is ready to haul Roots live-in partner, Eleazar Sheridan, to the pokey and call it quits. But Valentino keeps insisting over and over again that hes solved the case, and he turns out to be right just in time to prevent the murder of a latter-day Sharon Tate. Middling, highly proficient work from a pro who makes a virtue of economy by getting every chapter, scene, and sentence to pull its weight and then some.

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November 1, 2016

UCLA film archivist Valentino is good friends with Beata Limerick, who left Hollywood because of the curse on blonde actresses who tragically died young. When her death and that of another former actress recall the notorious demises of Marilyn Monroe and Thelma Todd, Valentino and Det. Ray Padillo work to solve the mystery in their sixth adventure, following Shoot.

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2016
Beata Limerick was a blonde bombshell when she quit the movies at 25. Now, decades later, she tells Valentino, UCLA film archivist and part-time movie sleuth, why she abandoned her career: I was afraid of the curse. What curse? The one that kills blondes in the movies: Thelma Todd, Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Sharon Tate. Val is skeptical until he finds Beata dead, her body arranged in the manner of Marilyn's corpse. More murders follow, with the victims laid out like other dead bombshells. Val, of course, is a suspect, but, really, he doesn't need that circumstance to motivate him. It's just too juicy a case to pass up. Estleman is one of the few genre vets who can jump from hard-boiled fare (his Amos Walker series) to jaunty entertainment and seem perfectly at ease in both camps. The movie trivia is a treat, and Val and girlfriend Harriet trade quips like William Powell and Myrna Loy (with Val's archivist mentor Kyle perhaps getting off the best one-liners of all). You can almost smell the popcorn.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)