First Review of SSS!

 

First review is in for the next Hollywood mystery, Saving Susy Sweetchild - and I'm happy to say Kirkus really loved it!

SAVING SUSY SWEETCHILD
Author: Barbara Hambly

Review Issue Date: July 15, 2024
Online Publish Date: June 15, 2024

The moral compass of an English expatriate will not let her ignore some of Hollywood’s more sordid exploits.

After losing her husband, family, and fortune to World War I, Emma Blackstone has been reduced to working as a dogsbody when she’s rescued by her American sister-in-law, Kitty Flint. Kitty, aka Camille de la Rose, is a lovely but terrible actress of the silent screen whose affair with the studio head allows her to keep churning out movies. Emma, who’s ignored all sorts of illegal and morally repugnant activity, finds that she can’t ignore the treatment of child star Little Susy Sweetchild on the set of Kitty’s latest film. Susy provides financial support for her beautiful but untalented actress mother, Selina Sutton, who’s unconcerned when her daughter is almost trampled by a horse while shooting a scene. Susy bravely keeps working with only her cat, Mr Gray, to help calm her fears. Emma, who serves as chaperone, Pekingese wrangler, and occasional scriptwriter, has also just accepted a part-time job sorting out the paperwork left behind by a UCLA professor who died, possibly by murder, in his office. When Susy and her mother are kidnapped, Emma is appalled by the studio’s attempts to avoid paying the ransom. Susy’s father is a drunk and her grandfather and aunts are all trying to get custody of her in order to live off her considerable earnings, which her mother spends entirely on herself. With help from her lover, cameraman Zal Rokatansky, Emma embarks on a search for Susy, whom she fears no one cares about enough to rescue from what may be an inside job gone wrong.

Exciting adventures and thorny mysteries gain gravitas from pointed social commentary.


In other news, I'm slowly recovering from jet-lag. Car issues prevented me from attending any part of the Nebula Awards Weekend - which was, frustratingly, only an hour away (or 90 minutes, at that time on a Friday afternoon). But I was so pleased to see, on Facebook posts, that author Greg Benford seems MUCH better, in his recovery from a stroke, than he looked when last I saw him in March.


At least I'm sufficiently over jeg-lag to be sleeping at the appropriate times of the night, and to get back to work on the next Ben January book... and also to discover, in the course of my research, that the nefarious goings-on I was inventing as the basis for the crime not only have a firm basis in historical fact, but were actually much more widespread and far-reaching (and appalling) than anything I could make up. Who knew?



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