Vamp

This is the seventh of the Valentino Mysteries (after Indigo, 2020), a series noted for the snappy first-person narrative of its protagonist, a UCLA film archivist and amateur sleuth. While involved in a project to restore an abandoned drive-in movie theater with his friend Dinky Schwartz, Valentino is also trying to help Leo Kalishnikov, a shady associate who is being blackmailed. (Gotta love those names!) Then he is approached by a man who says he has two reels of the lost 1917 film Cleopatra, starring Theda Bara, only snippets of which are known to exist. After the man claiming to have the film is found dead in Val's car, Estleman offers up a classic screwball comedy for reader to play out in their minds in frames of black and white. There's delightful banter, colorful quirky characters, and plenty of Hollywood clichés and fascinating lore sprinkled in. Those who enjoyed Stuart M. Kaminsky's Toby Peters series will want to get to know Valentino.

Estleman artfully folds Hollywood history into a crackerjack whodunit in the seventh outing for film-loving L.A. detective Valentino (after 2020's Indigo). Valentino, who's spent years restoring a classic Hollywood movie house, is asked by his high school classmate, Dinky Schwartz, for help reviving a moribund drive-in theater. Valentino seeks assistance from another friend, theater designer Leo Kalishnikov, who agrees to provide some of the necessary funding on the condition that Valentino identify his blackmailer. Years earlier, Leo became a murder suspect in a crime of passion with dark sexual undertones--it was a case of mistaken identity, and another man was convicted, but Leo fled questioning, and now someone has dug up reports of the incident and faxed them to Leo, threatening his reputation. Valentino's dance card gets even fuller when retired cop Jasper Grote claims to have access to reels of the legendary missing 1917 film Cleopatra, left behind by his grandfather, who held onto the reels after failing to deliver them to their proper storage space during a devastating tornado nearly 100 years ago. While chasing down the reels, Valentino finds a corpse in his car and sets out to discover if there's a connection to Leo's blackmailer. Estleman's encyclopedic knowledge of the movie industry and gift for dialogue shine throughout. This gets two thumbs up. Dominick Abel, Dominick Abel Literary Agency, Inc.(Nov.)