The Last Embrace - Softcover

Hamilton, Denise

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0743296737 ISBN 13: 9780743296731

Publisher: Scribner, 2008

Synopsis

Los Angeles 1949. A city of big dreams and dark shadows...

Lily Kessler, a former stenographer and spy for the OSS, comes to Los Angeles to find her late fiancé's sister Kitty, an actress who is missing from her Hollywood boardinghouse. The next day, Kitty's body is found in a ravine below the Hollywood sign. Unimpressed by the local police, Lily investigates on her own. As she delves into Kitty's life, she encounters fiercely competitive starlets, gangsters, an eccentric special-effects genius, exotic denizens of Hollywood's nightclubs, and a homicide detective who might distract her from her quest for justice. But the landscape in L.A. can shift kaleidoscopically, and Lily begins to see how easily a young woman can lose her balance and fall prey to the alluring city's dangers....

With vibrant characters and unerring insight into the desires and dark impulses that can flare between men and women, The Last Embrace showcases Denise Hamilton at the height of her storytelling powers as she transports readers to a fascinating, transitional time in one of America's most beguiling cities.

About this title

About the Author

Denise Hamilton is a writer-journalist whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Cosmopolitan, and The New York Times and is the author of five acclaimed Eve Diamond crime novels, Prisoner of Memory, Savage Garden, Last Lullaby, Sugar Skull, and The Jasmine Trade, all of which have been Los Angeles Times bestsellers. She is also the editor of and a contributor to the short story anthology Los Angeles Noir, winner of the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Award for Best Mystery of 2007. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two young children. Visit her at www.denisehamilton.com.

Reviews

It’s 1949, and Lily Kessler, former OSS spy, is home from Europe and visiting her hometown of Los Angeles to look for the sister of her late fiancé, an aspiring actress who has disappeared. Lily finds the missing Kitty quickly enough, but she is in the morgue, the first victim of a Black Dahlia–like serial killer who seems to be preying on the residents of a Hollywood boardinghouse for actresses. Lilly takes Kitty’s room in the house, starts investigating, and quickly becomes a target. Hamilton, author of the contemporary Eve Diamond series, capably mixes and matches here, combining a staple of women’s melodrama (career girls in a boardinghouse—see Haines’ Winter of Her Discontent)—with an edgy evocation of postwar, hard-boiled L.A., á la James Ellroy. It’s an unlikely combination of sweet and savory, but Hamilton makes it work with a engaging heroine and a cast of quirky supporting characters who seem to have walked off the set of Sunset Boulevard. The details click into place smoothly, the struggling actresses hit their marks, and even the obligatory romance avoids the smarm factor. Ellroy meets women’s fiction? Why not? --Bill Ott

Edition details

• Publisher: Scribner
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0743296737
• ISBN 13: 9780743296731
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 384