A Good, Hard Slap

There’s a moment early in this book where Gracie Perkins sits at her desk redialing a dead man’s phone number, just to keep up appearances. That’s the kind of detail that tells you Catherine Bator knows exactly what world she’s building.

The setup: a movie star turns up dead in his own library in January 1930, and a handful of women at Kaplan Talking Pictures decide the truth can’t come out. Gracie’s one of them. She’s also grieving a man the rest of the steno pool is glad to see gone, and that contradiction is what pulled me through the first hundred pages.

I liked the steno pool women more than I expected to. Mrs. Singer runs the department like she’s holding the whole studio together with pins and nerve. Molly Larson is the one everybody underestimates. Birdie Lockwood has a voice good enough to get her noticed outside the typing pool, and every scene with her had a little more air in it than the rest of the book.

Nick Zingarelli, the detective, doesn’t show up to save Gracie so much as to keep showing up, period. He washes dishes at Musso’s when he’s broke, he reads her screenplay drafts one at a time, and he tells her flat out that a story about two men joining an all-woman jazz band to dodge bootleggers is better than she thinks it is. I believed that relationship because Bator lets it be ordinary before it’s romantic.

There’s a scene that leans on Dante, and it shouldn’t work on paper. But it does. It’s one of the few places the book lets its two leads be a little larger than the story around them, and it earns that swing because everything before it has been so grounded.

There’s also a funeral late in the book, one that has nothing directly to do with the central mystery, and it’s where Gracie finally lets herself feel the weight of everything she’s been carrying. Bator plays that scene patiently, and it’s the emotional high point of the whole novel.

My only complaint is that a few threads involving the studio’s efforts to bury the truth get resolved faster than I wanted. I was ready for someone to answer for more of it than they do.

This is a confident debut, and Bator’s Hollywood is lived-in rather than researched. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants their period mystery to come with real ache attached to it.