The Devil's Playground

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Mary finds Norma’s cold, dead body, and she wonders for just a moment if these dark rumors could be true.

The skeleton ribs of other buildings lie scattered around the depression’s rim as if they have died of thirst at its waterless edge. It is inhabited with the famous beautiful people, with their carefully resurrected pasts, as fictional as the movies they create. With the looming threat of the ‘talkies’, every studio needed to make their mark, to salvage what was left of the careers of the silent movie greats, and to gain a foothold in a rapidly changing movie landscape. Characters: Protagonist and Hollywood fixer Mary Rourke, who is terrific and deserves her own full book, plus a wide and distinctly varied supporting cast in all three time periods.It's elegant, absorbing and thrilling' Michael Malone 'Totally engaging' Kathy Reichs, New York Times bestselling author of the Temperance Brennan series 'Brilliantly written, with repeated surprises' The Critic 'Seamlessly blends noir, gothic and mystery in a way that's unique to crime fiction. Ultimately, I enjoyed the Hollywood murder mystery, but found the occult and supernatural aspects to be lacking. She wears the Vulture Crown of ancient Egypt, topped with a golden Uraeus cobra, its rearing head in turn sun-disk crowned. The picture will be completed, but it will be destroyed in a huge fire, and all copies will disappear except for the one that is rumored to exist, somewhere. I was initially drawn to his books featuring Jan Fabel of the Hamburg Murder Squad and then a short series set on the gangster-ridden streets of Glasgow in the 1950s.

There were plenty of devotees of the psychic and weird in silent Hollywood, but these didn't come off as creepy enough. The characters are well drawn, the era is well evoked, and there's more than enough intrigue to keep the reader guessing. The Devil's Playground is Craig Russell at his unrivalled best' Chris Whittaker 'The Devil's Playground has a depth of period detail and atmosphere that lifts it above the ordinary. When Rourke finds Carlton dead, she wonders if the dark rumours she's heard are true: that The Devil's Playground really is a cursed production.

I expected an In the Mouth of Madness type story where this whole "cursed" film thing is actually central to the story and wreaks general havoc on everyone who sees it.

But when I do, I find you in the middle of nowhere in an abandoned hotel that happens to have a cinema screening room. Screen trickery that defied logic, stunts and effects so radical that they could only be done once but which helped establish the movie’s infamy. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Beneath his shirt he feels a trickle of sweat run down between his shoulder blades, like a tepid fingertip tracing his spine. After the water in the lake dried up, so did tourism and the cashflow, leading its destitute owner to kill himself and his family in a horrific murder-suicide.The Devil Aspect is a Gothic horror story set in Czechoslovakia in 1935 and Hyde is a dark thriller set in Victorian Edinburgh. Why did the witch, supposedly haven convinced everyone of her death by suicide, make one female fixer believe she died by murder thus starting an investigation? He also tosses out a bit of humor, giving a hulking studio heavyweight the nickname Golem, a nod to Paul Wegener’s partially lost 1915 film.