They say a life well-lived is the best revenge…Blanche Tucker longs to escape her drop-dead dull life in tiny Boynton, Oklahoma. Then dashing Graham Peyton roars into town. Posing as a film producer, Graham convinces the ambitious but naive teenager to run away with him to a glamorous new life. Instead, Graham uses her as cruelly as a silent picture villain. Yet by luck and by pluck, taking … luck and by pluck, taking charge of her life, she makes it to Hollywood.
Six years later, Blanche has transformed into the celebrated Bianca LaBelle, the reclusive star of a series of adventure films, and Peyton’s remains are discovered on a Santa Monica beach. Is there a connection? With all of the twists and turns of a 1920s melodrama, The Wrong Girl follows the daring exploits of a girl who chases her dream from the farm to old Hollywood, while showing just how risky—and rewarding—it can be to go off script.
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Fabulous romp through 1920s era Hollywood. A must for lovers of old Hollywood and quirky, fast-paced mysteries
Donis Casey has launched a new series. If you are a fan of Casey’s ten Alafair Tucker mysteries, you’ll know that she’s one of the best at writing dialogue and setting that plunges the reader into a very particular time and place. Her plots excite and entice. All that writing skill goes full speed ahead in the new series. The place has changed and moved forward (a little) in time. We’re (mostly) not in Oklahoma anymore, Toto.
It’s Hollywood and the films are silent. There are some truly brutish cads in the cast of characters, but the novel’s villainy is far more subtle than a silent flicker’s stereotypical bad guy. Nothing’s simple here and the wrongdoings have a way of creeping up on the reader in twisty, unsettling ways.
In the opening scene, a private detective, Ted Oliver, drives up to the luxurious estate of Bianca LaBelle, the star of “the biggest money-making movie franchise in the entire Western world.” The star, unlike her fellow actors who live “to see their names in print,” is an enigma. Rumors swirl about her origins. Is she from a noble French family, escaped to America to avoid an arranged marriage? She lives with Alma Bolding—an actress twenty years her senior and famous and wildly successful long before she took Bianca in. Salacious suggestions arise about the two women. Oliver rather doubts the scuttlebutt. He even doubts her name is Bianca LaBelle.
He’s come to ask her about a recent discovery of bones in a hillside along the coast, exposed by a recent storm. This is not the usual dead body in a murder mystery. Bianca answers Oliver’s inquiry with the slightly snide, “I’m as interested as anyone in Mr. Carter’s recent discoveries in Egypt,” but she denies knowing anything about bones. But those bones are trouble—that much we can guess, but the untangling of why and to whom will be ever so entertaining.
If this elegant young woman feels faintly familiar to Casey’s longtime readers, there’s a reason. After the first three gripping chapters, the novel shifts from 1926 Hollywood back to Boynton, Oklahoma in 1920. Bianca is Blanche, one of Alafair’s daughters. You will have met her if you read The Wrong Hill to Die On, but it won’t matter a bit if you haven’t. She isn’t content with her lot. Worse, she thinks she’s more worldly and wily than it turns out she is. Naivete can be dangerous—or perhaps dangereuse, if we’re going to stay in character. The novel quickly leaves Boynton behind and from there masterfully intertwines two timelines of events six years apart.
There’s both nail-biting suspense and humor in this mystery. The humor often lies in clever word play: “Southern California was chock-a-block with good looking men. Most of them with the character of a weasel, and in certain cases that comparison was insulting to weasels everywhere.”
Casey has a special talent for total reader immersion in the world of her novel through the speech patterns and word choices of each character. At one point someone we don’t like at all throws a small delay tactic with this bit of slang that puts us squarely in 20’s Hollywood, “let me go to the can and change my threads.” Blanche holds the job of narrator for parts of this tale, and her youth and innocence comes through vividly in her narrative voice, “Blanche had thought she couldn’t be more over the moon when she found out she was going to meet Alma Bolding, but Tom Mix was just the berries.” ‘Just the berries’? It’s enough to make the reader’s heart break with worry for this child. And the idea that a girl who is over the moon over a movie star can later be the cool, restrained woman of the opening scene? That puzzle laces this book with tension that will keep you turning pages.
Much as I love Alafair and will miss her fictional presence in my reading life, I am happy to report that Donis Casey’s extension westward and onward will not disappoint. I highly recommend The Wrong Girl. It’s the right book.
Interesting tale of a young girl in Oklahoma Territory in the early 1920s who is flim flammed, avoids the brothel she is sold to in Arizona, and mysteriously rises to stardom with a new name in the new world known as Hollywood motion pictures. Then six years later a man is murdered and turns out to be her flimflam man. Enter the sleuth. It is an enjoyable read.
I requested and received a free ebook copy from Poisoned Pen Press via NetGalley.
The Wrong Girl by Donis Casey takes a character from her long-running series, Alafair Tucker Mysteries, runs her away from home, and ends her up in Hollywood as a major motion picture star. My, that went fast didn’t it? Blanche is bored by life in Oklahoma. Like many teenagers, she wished for adventure and love. She believes she has found both when she meets Graham Peyton as she is mooning over movie magazines in the drugstore. He is an exciting older (to her) man who claims to by in the movies and able to get her a start in Hollywood. She falls for his story and runs away with him. Graham, being an expert at seducing young girls, goes slowly at first, shows her a good time, buys her beautiful clothing, and promises her marriage. Eventually that changes and she finds herself in his bed. Not loving the act, she figures it is worth it for the rest of the life her promises…until one morning she wakes up to find him and all the beautiful clothing gone, and herself left with a gross old man who has “bought” her from Graham and is taking her to start a new “job.” Being naive but not stupid, Blanche takes off at her first opportunity and runs through the high desert until she is cold, hungry, and exhausted. She comes upon a cabin and knocks on the door. Her life is about to change.
What a wonderful new series. In Hollywood the reader meets all kinds of characters, some fictional, some not. Blanch is there although now she is Bianca LeBelle, and is indeed a movie star. But there is a mystery afoot. Graham Peyton, the man who had seduced her many years ago, has been found dead, as he has apparently been for at least five years, so long he is now nothing more than a skeleton. A local mobster, K.D. Dix, has hired a private investigator, Ted Oliver to ascertain the killer and retrieve a red ledger that Peyton had at the time of his death. The book is interesting in that he swivels between 1928 and 1920, telling the entire story as it happens. Blanche and Alma are wonderful characters, as is Delphinia Gilbert, Alma’s personal assistant and Blanche’s pseudo-mother. It is so exciting to be in Hollywood at the beginning, when pictures were still silent and meet so many important players. Casey has done a fabulous job interweaving the story within in this crime investigation and the glitz and glamour of the time. This countrified Oklahoman has fulfilled the American Dream, come to Hollywood and made it big. There definitely will be more. I love this book and recommend it very highly as a stirring piece of Americana.
I received a free ARC of The Wrong Girl from Netgalley. All opinions and interpretations contained herein are solely my own. #netgalley #thewronggirl