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In 1919, Hollywood film star Mary Pickford, "the most famous woman in the world," is currently in between pictures and recovering from the Spanish Flu when a man shows up at her Malibu hideaway one night asking for help. The man, who's been shot twice in the back, then dies in her garden, and Mary makes up her mind to figure out what's going on. Assisted by her resourceful young driver, Billy Kidd, a rodeo rider and wrangler from Arizona, she soon finds herself involved in a series of dangerous abductions, abandonments, and murders that lead to San Francisco, Death Valley, then back to Los Angeles.
Who's the mysterious man who died in her Malibu garden?
What's happened to Suzanne Smith's missing baby?
What's the involvement of Mary's close friend, the powerful Hollywood tycoon Adolph Zukor?
About the author
William Baer is the author of thirty books including Times Square and Other Stories, Psalter: A Sequence of Catholic Sonnets, Classic American Films: Conversations with the Screenwriters, Luís de Camões: Selected Sonnets (translations from the Portuguese); and the Jack Colt Mystery series, New Jersey Noir. A graduate of Rutgers, NYU, South Carolina, the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and USC Cinema, he's been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fulbright (Portugal), an NEA fellowship in fiction, the T. S. Eliot Award, and the Jack Nicholson Screenwriting Award. He was also the founding editor of the Formalist, the founding director of the St. Robert Southwell Summer Workshops, and the film critic and poetry editor at Crisis.
