It's arguably a sign of laziness when a critic compares a novel under review to a film rather than to another book, and yet it would seem neglectful not to liken Windhall to something on the silver screen. That's because Ava Barry's thoroughly cinematic debut, which revolves around an unsolved Hollywood Golden Age murder, has Sunset Boulevard's curdled-glamor mise-en-scène, All About Eve's backstage intrigue and The Day of the Locust's crushing disillusionment with Tinseltown.
Windhall's narrator, Max Hailey, a journalist with the Los Angeles Lens, would gladly swap modern-day L.A.'s artisanal coffee-drinking hipsters for the impeccably dressed sidecar-swilling swells of the 1940s. He has long been captivated by the unsolved 1948 murder of movie star Eleanor Hayes: as the story goes, one night at a party at Windhall, the Benedict Canyon mansion belonging to A-list director Theodore Langley, he fatally stabbed the actress in his garden. Theo was arrested, but evidence tampering foiled the case against him. After he was released from all charges, he seemed to vanish. Windhall has been unoccupied ever since.
Sixty-nine years later, the body of a young woman is found in a garden near Windhall; she's wearing a green silk dress like the one that Eleanor was killed in and, like Eleanor, she has been stabbed. Spurred by the media's flogging of the two deaths' parallels, Max decides to write a story about Theo and prove that the director killed Eleanor. Still, even Max has to wonder how logical it would have been for a director to murder his star when they were in the middle of shooting a movie.
Windhall is such an intoxicating throwback that readers may find themselves picturing Max in a fedora and trench coat as he noses around a faded Los Angeles, following up leads. The mystery's reverse time travel vibe intensifies as Max reads from Theo's journals, which include scenes involving some of the era's big names: the actor Errol Flynn goes on a boozy spree with Theo, and at one point the gossip columnist Hedda Hopper tells the sozzled director, "You haven't achieved the kind of grandeur necessary to become an alcoholic wreck." Barry's ultimately rewarding plot employs old mystery tropes--telltale bloodstains; a discovered-by-chance photo that offers a vital clue--that play as homage, not clichés. By the time Max announces, "I'm after a big fish, and this time, I'm not going to let him go," readers will have conflated the terms "over-the-top" and "just right." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: This highly cinematic modern-day mystery, which revolves around a 70-year-old unsolved murder, is a sparkling homage to Hollywood's Golden Age.