The Devil's Playground

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As a mystery, there's not a false note in The Devil's Playground," with Mary and her crooked cop poking their noses into sensitive places as the story becomes increasingly sticky and strange. Ultimately, I enjoyed the Hollywood murder mystery, but found the occult and supernatural aspects to be lacking. A New York financier moved his family out here about ’20 or ’21 and built this hotel and a whole lot of lodges around the lake.

In his previous novel, The Devil Aspect (2019), Russell handily managed two parallel narratives concerning madness and murder.

There isn’t much graphic violence but there are a lot of mysterious horrors nonetheless (even if much of it is indirectly suggested)! The house sits in the foothills, elevated enough to offer an unbroken twenty-five-mile view across the city to the ocean. One villain is a woman of color, described in the most despicable stereotypical language; the other is disfigured .

There is a row of Spanish Colonial armchairs, the seat and back of each thick-padded and dressed in tooled blood-red leather, the naked wooden armrests lion-clawed. Yes, this is a movie with a dark, horror themed edge, so perhaps it’s not entirely unexpected, but in a novel that, superficially at least, speaks more to Curtis Hanson’s LA Confidential or Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, than it does William Friedkin’s The Exorcist, there is something in it that has the capacity to make the skin crawl, and certainly kept me on edge. I liked her strength and tenacity, and her determination to get to the bottom of what had really happened when Hollywood starlet, Norma Carlton, was murdered. But the world moves on and sadly a lot of the glamour and mystique that surrounded Hollywood’s big hitters has been lost with it. Film scholar Paul Conway drives to an old hotel in the Mojave Desert in 1967, hoping to find the one existing print of the “greatest horror movie” ever made: The Devil’s Playground.The story takes place over three periods of time and the focus of the plot is a silent movie and its participants. She is interrupted by the sounds of the young patrolman protesting as someone makes their way in through the main door downstairs. We also are introduced to an alleged voodoo queen in the Louisiana swamp back in 1907 and even further back the author takes us to introduce many aspects of the plot, all of which add to the mystery of Norma's death, the cursed movie production, and missing young girls who flocked to Hollywood in the early days of film to become the next big star. Loved the setting, loved the mystery and loved the sense of danger and tension which simmered throughout each and every chapter. Now all that’s left at the site is a shell of a thriving town that could have once rivaled Hollywood, and it is here where Paul hopes to learn the whereabouts of the legendary lost film.

Her current mess is the death of Playground’s star, Norma Carlton, a murder made to look like a suicide. I just don’t understand why you gave it all up, back then, at the height of it all—­why you went to such lengths to disappear. Before it’s over however there will be another dead body and possibly even hers although at first it seems like she is uncovering nothing she must be uncovering something because there are people out to her trying to silence what she doesn’t even know she knows yet.When a film historian is hired to follow the lead to what may be the sole surviving copy of the film, it leads him, and readers, through the dark and deadly final days of production on the movie, during which one of the stars is found murdered and calamitous events are set to secure the movies status as one of the most cursed productions of all time. I gave it to the halfway point to really grab me, but it just never did and I decided not to invest anymore time into it. Paul Conway, film historian and fervid silent movie aficionado, is on the trail of a tantalizing rumour: that a single copy of The Devil’s Playground—a Holy Grail for film buffs that was supposedly cursed and lost to time—may still exist. As she passes, she looks into the parked police wagon and, seeing it is empty, walks on through the open gates and up to the house.

This breathtaking tale–set against America’s favorite backdrop, Hollywood–seamlessly blends noir, gothic, and mystery. He offers a complex cast and brilliantly weaves their backstories throughout the book as he takes the reader back and forth in time.A breathtaking, dark beauty and a potent sensuality radiate from the woman, who is dressed in a figure- hugging, diaphanous cloth-of-gold kalasiris. 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. An] excellent, engrossing historical horror novel, one that explores the symbiosis of power and evil in the Golden Age of Hollywood.