SCANDAL IN BABYLON

An educated British woman’s work at a Tinseltown studio is exhilarating, exasperating, and dangerous.

In a major departure from her 19th-century tales of freed Black man Benjamin January, including House of the Patriarch (2021), Hambly introduces a world of glamour and deceit. After losing her husband to World War I and her family to the Spanish flu, Emma Blackstone has been rescued from a soul-sucking job as a paid companion by her sister-in-law, Kitty Flint, better known as Hollywood starlet Camille de la Rose. Emma keeps Kitty’s household going, cares for three beloved Pekingese, and rewrites scripts for Foremost Productions, whose studio chief is just one of Kitty’s myriad lovers. Before she can join her aunt, who’s written to say that she’s returning to England from India, Emma must help Kitty by solving the murder of Rex Festraw, her not-quite-ex-husband. Rex showed up on set unexpectedly, and before Kitty even gets to meet with the man she married at 15, he’s found dead in her dressing room, shot by her own gun. Asked for an alibi, Kitty claims to have been searching for one of her dogs, but Emma suspects that she was meeting a lover. The studio staff naturally spring into action to protect their star, and the corrupt police quickly release her, but the plot to frame Kitty, with several forged but incriminating death threats found with the body, imperils everyone around her until Emma and her love interest, cameraman Zal Rokatansky, can find the real killer.

A sparkling series launch featuring Hollywood hijinks and a clever sleuth.