The Midnight of the Year

The year's longest night, but mild, sunny, and windy in Southern California. As an early Christmas gift, I got this, this morning - a nice, starred review in Publisher's Weekly.


Set in Roaring ’20s Hollywood, Hambly’s outstanding sequel to 2021’s Scandal in Babylon showcases the author’s wit and her compassion for the underdog. Tinseltown glamor girl Kitty Flint has rescued her widowed British sister-in-law, Emma Blackstone, from a dismal paid companionship in England. Now Kitty’s constant companion, gofer, and Pekinese-brusher, plucky Emma wavers between longing for Oxford’s dreaming spires, where she hoped to study archaeology, and her fascination with corrupt Hollywood and her cameraman lover. Then early one morning, director Ernst Zapolya, an old boyfriend of Kitty’s, phones, wanting to speak to Kitty, but Emma tells him she isn’t home. Ernst says it’s about a matter “on which lives depend. Maybe many lives.” A murder ensues. In the search for a killer, Kitty and Emma must deal with bootleggers, feuding Stalinists and Trotskyites, a lecherous leading man, and an agent from the U.S. Bureau of Investigation. Clever repartee and luscious local California color contrast with filmmaking fakery. Hambly vividly portrays a sad world of orphans and strangers, extras, and animals sacrificed for a director’s whims, and desperate wannabes who fling themselves onto casting couches. This moving entry more than delivers on the promise of its predecessor. 

The book is due to be released in March. In the meantime, I'm wrapping up the semester, assigning final grades and trying to prioritize my time: prep house for Christmas guests, or get some writing done? Do I REALLY want to climb up and down that ladder twenty or thirty times to hang the ornaments from the rafters so the cats won't play soccer with them? Oh, yeah... and WRAPPING presents... and making Christmas dinner. And helping to move the dojo to its new quarters a mile or so down Santa Monica Boulevard.

Have yourselves a merry little Christmas.
 

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