The Devil's Playground

A fantanstic noir set in old Hollywood. A bit of mystery, with some thrills, chills and a bit of horror mixed in. Fantastic characters and prose that makes you feel like you are in a 1940's film noir. Cannot say too much about the plot without giving away too much, just to say that if you like Noir, mysterys, and well written period pieces, this novel would be for you.

5 Stars. Might be the best mystery I have read in 2023.

I thoroughly enjoyed this novel for its immersive setting in the early days of Hollywood, as well as for its mystery plot. I was engaged throughout and looked forward to picking the book up again after putting it down. That said, I have a degree in film and I am obsessed with murder mysteries so this novel centered around two of my biggest interests. I particularly liked the protagonist, Mary Rourke, and favored the chapters that followed her versus the Louisiana subplot.

I knocked it down a star because it had a few imperfections that bothered me: namely, the first chapter, the high body count, and the elongated ending that didn't leave me fully satisfied. I almost put the book down thinking I'd made a mistake after the first page. The author has a fondness for (take note) double-word adjectives that got more tolerable over time but the first couple paragraphs had excessive detail describing the desert. I'm glad I kept going with it.

My biggest gripe is that the author really played up the antagonist as evil incarnate and, I don't know about everyone else, but when we're dealing with a stark good versus evil binary, I want good to prevail with a magnificent flourish in the end. Otherwise, there needs to be more grey area. There were so many (I mean, so many) deaths that were the result of being brainwashed by pure evil that I was ready for the antagonist to finally meet their match in the end.

Besides that, I would recommend this one to fans of noir mystery and old Hollywood.

I sort of expected more from a mystery thriller set in old 1920s Hollywood. Maybe that was a me and my expectations problem?

Mary Rourke is someone movie studios call on when they need something fixed or resolved quietly that might have a PR impact. She's called to the home of Norma Carlton, a household name in silent films, because she was found dead. She's also working on a film Hollywood can't stop talking about, The Devil's Playground, an open secret everyone knows about but nobody wants anything to do with because of a curse. She sets about investigating this woman's murder to see if there's something larger at play than what it appears on the surface, and finds out there's an entire dark underside to Hollywood she wasn't prepared for.

There's also a second viewpoint mentioned in the summary of this book, but only appears in the very beginning and at the very end, to introduce the reader to the idea of The Devil's Playground being this lost film nobody has a copy of and to bring the whole thing to a close. I don't really consider this book a dual viewpoint story, as the vast majority is from Mary Rourke's viewpoint, with some interspersed historical chapters involving some essential backstory.

Right off the bat I want to say that I thought the writing was excellent. I love my descriptive scenes, and this book really nails the feel of 1920s prohibition Hollywood. Full points for that. I also like Mary Rourke's character, and thought she was a great person to share this story with. She seems smart, no-nonsense, and able to handle all the alpha personalities around her fairly well. It's also clear that the author did their homework on 1920s Hollywood, as there's a lot of details included within the story that sometimes was distracting.

Unfortunately, I thought the overall mystery was kind of lackluster and overdeveloped for the eventual payoff. I didn't really see the ending coming, and felt like a lot of what happened before wasn't all that relevant in hindsight. This overdevelopment also led to so many characters to keep up with, all with delightfully generic Hollywood names, that I had a hard time remembering who was who until well into a conversation.

It was just an okay book in the end, but ultimately not very memorable.