In 1948 Hollywood, a treacherous world of tough-talking private eyes, psychopathic movie stars, and troubled starlets, sixteen-year-old Alice tries to find a young runaway who is the sole witness to a beating that put her sister, Annie, in a coma.
Fric Manheim, ten-year-old son of the world's biggest movie star, known as The Face, must depend on the family's security chief Ethan Truman and his rather inept guardian angel for help when anarchist Corky Laputa decides to shake things up by kidnapping the boy.
When film producer Moe Block Busters offers to make their book into a movie, Iggy, Olive, and Seymour head to Hollywood where Olive, furious at being written out of the script, enlists the help of a famed femme fatale to scare the despicable director half to death.
Life is good for Hollywood princess Kaitlin Burke, ready to star in a movie by her favorite director, but an old love and a scheming new publicist complicate her already hectic existence.
In 1927, George Valentin is a silent movie superstar. However, the advent of the talkies will kill his career and he will sink into oblivion. For young extra Peppy Miller, it seems the sky's the limit as major movie stardom awaits. Though their careers are taking different paths their destinies will become entwined.
Detective Ren?e Ballard is working the graveyard shift again, and returns to Hollywood Station in the early hours only to find that an older man has snuck in and is rifling through old file cabinets. The intruder is none other than legendary LAPD detective Harry Bosch, working a cold case that has gotten under his skin. Ballard kicks him out, but eventually Bosch persuades her to help and she relents. Bosch is investigating the death of fifteen-year-old Daisy Clayton, a runaway who was brutally murdered. He crossed paths with her devastated mother while working a previous case, and Daisy's story has seized hold of him.
"A ... novel of the close friendship and fascinating creative partnership between two of Hollywood's earliest female legends: screenwriter Frances Marion and superstar Mary Pickford"--Dust jacket.
