Stewart "Hoagy" Hoag is an author, except he really only had one great novel. Now his agent wants him to ghostwrite a story about another one-hit-wonder author, Richard Aintree. Richard and Hoagy were once close because Hoagy dated one of Richard's daughters, Reggie. Richard has gone into hiding since the mysterious death of his poet wife in the 70s.
Now, in the 90s, Reggie and her sister Monette are estranged from their father, but also from each other. Both are authors in their own right, but Monette wrote a memoir claiming her father sexually abused her when she was a child. Reggie never believed her sister, and wanted nothing to with her after that. Monette has become a media mogul and is contacted via letters by someone claiming to her father. Reggie is also receiving similarly written letters, and everyone is trying to figure out who these are actually coming from.
Hoagy heads to Brentwood to stay in Monette's guest house to start researching his book about her father, but he gets caught up in the investigation of the mysterious letters. The more he researches and discovers, the more danger Hoagy finds himself inβnot just from possible murderers, but also from falling for Reggie again...
THE GIRL WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES David Handler is a great mystery thriller, with a little bit of romance. At first, I couldn't get into this book, but after a while, it picked up. The way that Handler describes Hoagy's low-key demeanor reminded me of Colombo. There were several backstories to keep track of in this book, which could be a little confusing, but they all come together in the end. If you like a book with quirky characters, you will really like this book. It is the ninth book in the Stewart Hoag series, but not confusing without reading the previous books. Give it a chance!
David Handler returns with the first book in the Hoagy
&
Lulu series in two decades, a madcap mystery about an
eccentric family of influential artists, and how
Hollywood's
obsession with the spotlight can sometimes turn deadlyβ
full
of delicious LA folklore and 90s nostalgia.
One-hit-wonder author turned ghostwriter and amateur
sleuth Stewart "Hoagy" Hoag and his persnickety basset
hound
Lulu are back for their first appearance in twenty
yearsβ¦.
The year is 1992. Clinton is on the road to the white
house,
Kurt Cobain fever has taken over America's youth, and
cell
phones are the size of your head. Hoagy is pulled back
into
the orbit of the brilliant, erratic, maddening poet
Reggie
Aintree, whom he was deeply in love with before he met
his
ex, Merilee Nash. Reggie and her sister Monette believe
they've been contacted by their long-lost father from
whom
theyβve been estranged for decades. Richard Aintree
wrote
one captivating novel that is read in every high school
English class. But he fell off the face of the earth
after
his wife (the girls' mother), a distinguished American
poet
in her own right, committed suicide on a bad acid trip in
the '70s.
To complicate matters further, Monette found her first
taste
of fame at twenty-years-old when she published Father
Didn't Know Best, a memoir falsely accusing her
father
of sexual abuse. Though she tried to recant her
accusations
in subsequent books, the damage was done. She and her
sister
Reggie have not spoken since. Now, Monette is a media
mogul
whose empire is crumbling, and Reggie runs the Root-
Chakra
Institute in Upstate New York. Recently, both sisters
have
received mysterious typewritten letters from their
father.
Into this crazy mix comes Hoagy, who is staying in the
pool
house at Monette's Brentwood mansion after heβs been
hired
as a ghostwriter to document the tell-all book that could
result from this mess. But when murder strikes, itβs
more
important than ever for him to pull fact from fiction as
he
races to catch a clever, sinister killer.
No excerpt available.
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