Extra Corpse Reviews

 

And, two more EXCELLENT reviews for One Extra Corpse, which will be released a week after Iron Princess. (I'm sorry - it just worked out that way!)

Starred Review in Booklist:

In this sequel to the excellent Scandal in Babylon (2021), it’s been several months since the

recently widowed Emma Blackstone came to Hollywood from Britain and promptly extricated her

new employer, the famous movie star Kitty Flint, from a murder charge. Now, in May 1924,

Emma feels like her new life in Tinseltown might finally be calming down. Until film director Ernst

Zapolya, who happens to be one of Kitty’s (many) former lovers, says he has a problem only

Kitty can solve. And Kitty can’t possibly do anything without Emma’s help. Hambly, who’s known

primarily for a series of novels featuring the nineteenth-century sleuth Benjamin January

(although she’s published in multiple genres), knocks this second in her Silver Screen series out

of the park. Everything feels just right: the characters are abundantly human, the mystery is

beautifully constructed, and the Hollywood milieu is vividly realized. Readers who enjoyed the

first Emma Blackstone novel will like this one every bit as much, if not more. 

(Review by David Pitt)


And in Kirkus:

Sex, drugs, scandal, and murder in Hollywood’s early days.

After losing most of her family during World War I, proper English widow and scholar Emma Blackstone ends up living with her flighty sister-in-law, Kitty Flint, better known as movie star Camille de la Rose. Emma acts as Kitty's secretary, dresser, confidante, and Pekinese wrangler and has also started writing scripts for historically inaccurate costume dramas. Currently pretending to be leading man Harry Garfield’s amatory interest, Emma’s actually in love with cameraman Zal Rokatansky—but that’s not written in stone, since Kitty and everyone else Emma knows switch lovers constantly. A phone call from director Ernst Zapolya urgently asking to see Kitty plunges the women into danger. When they visit him in his bungalow on the Enterprise Studios lot, they're interrupted by studio boss Lou Jesperson, and Ernst never gets to tell Emma what he wants. In an era when workers have little protection from sharpshooters using real bullets because they look better on camera, it’s no wonder that animals and people sometimes die on movie sets. Searching for Ernst to continue their meeting, Emma finds his body along with very young actress Nomie Carlyle in a dead faint. Since Ernst has been shot at point-blank range, his death was clearly no accident, but the show must go on. Nomie, who claims to have seen a woman in black nearby, fears that she’s in the frame for the murder. Her appeal for help entangles Emma and Kitty with gangsters, the FBI, communists, and a plethora of narcissistic movie stars.

A wild lineup of possible killers mingles with historically accurate info in a fast-paced mystery

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