The 10th Maggie Hope historical mystery by Susan Elia MacNeal is a particularly distinctive one, and not just because THE HOLLYWOOD SPY (Bantam, 368 pp., $27) takes the red-haired former spy from bomb-ravaged London to America, where she grew up.
It’s 1943, and Hollywood is busy peddling celluloid fantasies that export the rosy American dream to war-struck Europe and Britain. Maggie, however, discovers something far darker upon her arrival in Los Angeles.
She’s there, ostensibly, to help her friend (and simmering romantic interest) John Sterling investigate the suspicious death of his fiancée, who was found drowned at the famed Garden of Allah Hotel. Maggie soon connects this death to a festering underground of Nazi sympathizers, whose activities appear chaotic on the surface but more terrifyingly organized at closer examination.
MacNeal’s brisk plotting and efficient dialogue propel a mystery cloaked in some universal truths: History is determined to repeat itself, no front is ever united and Hollywood, despite its glamour and sparkle, is a hall of mirrors.
Ashley Winstead’s mordant debut novel, IN MY DREAMS I HOLD A KNIFE (Sourcebooks Landmark, 352 pp., $28.99), is the latest entry in the budding subgenre of “dark academia,” where the crime narrative takes place on a college campus.
Jessica Miller’s life is, and always has been, a performance. Duquette University was supposed to be a place of reinvention, somewhere she could transcend her broken, damaged background. At the beginning, surrounded by a group of new friends, that’s what it is.
