As a 3rd generation Angeleno, I looked forward to reading about streets and scenes my mother often referenced. I was disappointed. However, the story was enough to keep me looking for Silver Lake, more specifics about Hollywood Blvd. and the people who lived in those romantic homes as you wound around and up to the Hollywood Sign. I was not "glued", but it helped lull me to sleep at night and in the end, I finished with a yawn.

"The Last Embrace" takes place primarily in Los Angeles, but Denise Hamilton is obviously aware of those far-flung residential areas that were also in existence in 1949. She expands the action in her story to include outlying cities like South Pasadena and even Duarte. Having grown up in Los Angeles and later the San Gabriel Valley myself, I found it gratifying that the author gave the suburbs an opportunity to impact her story's plot.

Denise Hamilton takes the reader back to Los Angeles, in the heyday of Hollywood, for two violent weeks in 1949 in her first standalone, The Last Embrace. The reader sees the city, and its dangers, through the fresh eyes of Lily Kessler. Her impressions bring the story to life.

Lily was a stenographer and spy for the OSS in Europe. Following the war, she found herself without a job, as so many women were as the men returned. She lost her fiancé, her job, and doesn't have a home. When she visits the woman who would have been her mother-in-law, Mrs. Croggan asks her to go to LA to look for her daughter, a starlet who took the name of Kitty Hayden, and disappeared. But, almost as soon as Lily arrives in town, and goes to the boardinghouse where Kitty lives, the young woman's body is found by the Hollywood sign. Lily feels she owes it to her fiancé's memory to find out what happened. And, once she meets the two detectives in charge of the case, she's even more determined to investigate. Lily doesn't trust the cops to find the truth. She'll keep probing, and upsetting people, until she upsets a few too many people. Two more bodies are found, as Lily continues to push herself deeper and deeper into a dark world.

Los Angeles in 1949 wasn't all glamour. The girls staying in the boardinghouse were wannabe actresses with stars in their eyes. They saw Frank Sinatra singing, fancy restaurants, movies and glamour. But, Lily saw a city of crooked cops on the take where rival gangsters were at war, a world where the movie studios paid off the cops, the newspapers, and abortion doctors. She encountered a city where men could be hounded to their deaths by cops and media, where cover-ups were likely.

Los Angeles became a dangerous city for Lily Kessler, although she falls for a cop, and finds a photographer friend. She discovers that murder investigation isn't quite the same as the spy business. Since she never knows who to trust, she might be heading down the same track as another bright girl, Kitty Hayden.


Hamilton's book has a couple problems. Lily's character is well-developed, but one of the other characters, Harry Jack, almost seems to be dropped midstream. Lily seems to be the only living character against a backdrop of stereotypes. The varying viewpoints sometimes makes the story feel disjointed. However, The Last Embrace vividly shows the contrast between the historic past of a small town, and the growth, with crime, power and ambition. Despite the character issue, this is a meaty crime novel with a great deal that could be used for a book discussion. I can't even touch on all of the topics - the roles of women, the history of LA, crime and the movie studios. In the end, Lily grows to accept LA, in all its dirty history and glamour. If some of the characters are weak, the city of Los Angeles itself is a strong character, in all its grit and glory. The Last Embrace is a crime novel, the story of a time and place, with all its flaws, portrayed with love by Denise Hamilton.

Weaving into her novel a series of murders in 1949 Los Angeles, and loosely basing her work on the disappearance of the statuesque Jean Spangler, a 27-year-old actress, and dancer who mysteriously disappeared in October 1949, Denise Hamilton has written a tense and compelling mystery that encapsulates every part imaginable of this multi-faceted and at times darkly menacing city.

Lily Kessler, an ex-OSS investigator who worked in Europe with her late fiancé, Major Joseph Croggan, has just arrived in Los Angeles to search for her sister-in-law, Doreen Croggan. Lily had never met Kitty, a girl who'd come to Hollywood dreaming of stardom in 1944, around the same time that Lily had fed to Europe. Doreen was a fiercely spirited girl who'd graduated from walk-on roles to a studio contract, changed her name to Kitty Hayden, and seemed awash in projects right up until last week when she disappeared into the L.A. air.

Let loose in the city of her childhood, "with its sugar-white beaches and pastel bungalows with red tile roofs," Lily ends up staying at the Hollywood Wilcox Boarding House for young Ladies, where under the under the watchful, strange eyes of the officious Mrs. Potter, the girl is positively overwhelmed by the ghosts and shadows of Kitty that no amount no sunshine could possibly dispel. It is her Lily's friendships with Kitty's roommates, their casual cruelty and silky competitiveness, that tell Lily much about the reality of Kitty's genteel poverty, which contrasted sharply with Mrs. Croggan's boasts about her daughter taking Hollywood by storm.

Lily soon learns from the other girls that the camera loved her sister-in-law: "even if she's only on screen for five minutes, you see the vulnerability, the nakedness, it's like you gaze through her eyes and see her soul." When Kitty's body is discovered in a ravine beneath the Hollywood sign, strangled, her purse and shoe missing, but with no obvious signs of sexual violation, the heartbroken Lily is empowered to delve even further into her sister-in-law's murky existence in those final days before she was murdered.

Teaming up with local newspaper photographer Harry Jack and then with two detectives from the Central Homicide Bureau, Detective Magruder, built like a pickle barrel and the loose limbed but dashingly handsome Detective Pico, Lily steadily pieces together the motives for Kitty's death. The girls at the Boarding House, with their swirls and eddies of conflicted allegiances, positively swear that Kitty had no vices - she worked long hours and dated a lot, but had no one steady, except of course, the RKO special effects technician Max Vranizan who had a crush on Kitty and who Kitty's roommates warned her was eccentric and prone to obsessions.

Had Max tried to control Kitty then killed her when that proved impossible? With the support of Pico, whom Lily becomes completely smitten with even though she suspects he knows things about Kitty's murder he hasn't yet told her, Lily tries to build her case. Unfortunately, the discovery of Kitty's body has also gets the attention of some powerful players, particularly local mobsters, Mickey Cohen and Jack Dragna who are currently are engaged in a fierce turf war that is reverberating throughout Los Angeles' criminal underworld.

This is also a company town where the movie studios rule, often desperate to protect the images of their movie stars who are considered gods and who think they can do anything they want, yet are also fearful of the negative publicity that would damn their careers and scandalize their marriages.

As Hamilton's narrative powerfully swirls and unfurls atop each page, the net begins to draw tight around Lily, the search for Kitty's killers and indeed the attentions of Pico unleashing strange desires inside of her. Where characters are more often than not fuelled by blackmail and greed and where criminals abound in a city of lost souls, Lily, now in danger of her own life, must try to navigate her way through this anti-paradise, its dreams written on parchment-thin bougainvillea that is in danger of crumbling with the first breeze of fall. A page-turning mystery from the outset, Lily finds herself battling a possible betrayal even as she finds herself the center of the novel's violent conclusion high atop the Hollywood Hills and beneath the sign, that eternal and almost mythical symbol of all that has come to represent Los Angeles. Mike Leonard July 08.

In 1949 Hollywood, former OSS agent Lily Kessler searches for actress Kitty Hayden, the sister of her late fiancé, US Army Major Joseph Croggan. As she travels by train to California Lily thinks of Joseph, whom she met and fell in love in London during the war as they battled spies together until he died eight months ago in a Budapest car accident. Lily is worried about Kitty who vanished while seeking either rich sugar daddies or men with influence who give her parts.

After taking a room in Kitty's dumpy boarding house, Lily learns Kitty has been murdered; conjuring up the notorious Black Dahlia homicide. Unable to resist as she feels she owes her late fiancé for failing his sister, Kitty investigate the homicide. The case and police corruption lead her to Police Detective Stephen Pico, who pleads with her to let it go. In spite of her attraction to the cop, Lily continues her inquiries though her efforts could lead to her to joining Kitty.

This engaging Hollywood historical mystery is fun to follow due to the antics of the fully developed heroine and the cop who adores her and tries to prevent her from getting killed. The support cast is a bit flat, but the audience will not care as Lily is the star of this look at the film industry between WWII and Korea inside of a well written whodunit.

Harriet Klausner