Keyhole Crime S.
4 total works
She arrived at Peggy Cuneen's Los Angeles boarding house with no ID. She asked for a room, fell asleep silently, and has yet to wake up. Even doctors are baffled. The only thing they know for sure is there are no signs of physical illness and no evidence of bodily trauma. In fact, she's so flawlessly perfect it's as if she's been wrapped in cellophane her entire life. When her picture hits the newspapers, she's positively identified - by three claimants who all have different stories. One swears she's his niece, a runaway heiress. Another, that she's a renowned mystic popular in religious circles. And the third, a frantic mother insisting the Jane Doe's her daughter, who came to Hollywood looking for fame and subsequently disappeared. Are they lying? Mistaken? In denial? Or is it something more insidious? As a protective infatuation turns to obsession, Peggy's son, Matt, is desperate to find out, but his investigation only yields a stunning new piece of the puzzle. From the Edgar Award-winning novelist who "registers the cold blue shadow cast by Southern California's sunny promise," Dream of Fair Woman is a brilliant and chilling suspense novel (L.A. Weekly).
Olivia Hudson, a drama teacher at a Manhattan girl's school, refuses to let her uncle John Paul Marcus play the role of dupe in a real-life revenge story. Uncle John is a beloved war veteran, a New York institution, and a hard-working philanthropist with an unimpeachable reputation. His mistake - an honorable one, at that - was disclosing the financial chicanery of industrial heir Raymond Pankerman, and it could cost John his life. Raymond has staged the perfect crime, and the perfect frame-up, to destroy the old man. He has everything he needs: a failed and penniless playwright who'd sell his soul if the price was right, a budding television starlet looking for a breakout role, and a susceptible public suckered into believing a supernatural swindle that's making headlines. As a good man is taken down by the outlandish claims of an "otherworldly" publicity-seeking beauty nicknamed the Dream Walker, Olivia refuses to stand idly by - especially since she has the talent to outwit and outplay an actress at her own duplicitous game. Inspired by the mob mentality of the postwar McCarthy hearings, Charlotte Armstrong's The Dream Walker (also published as Alibi for Murder) is both an ingeniously clever mystery of double-crosses and triple-twists, and a still-relevant cautionary tale about the irreversible consequences of tabloid journalism and the gullibility of the masses.