• Fiction / Science Fiction

The incomparable icon of American literature delivers the third noir tale in his illustrious career. . . . “Thank the shades of Twain and Melville and the living presence of Pynchon . . . that this Poet Laureate of the Chimerical and Phantasmagoric is still with us, still writing, still freshening our ration of dream dust.”—Los Angeles Times

The author of 100 books, Ray Bradbury has written but two mystery novels -- Death is a Lonely Business and A Graveyard for Lunatics, both set in 1950s Venice, CA., and narrated by a young screenwriter. Now the screenwriter isn’t so green anymore, but mystery and murder still abound in this, the third of Bradbury’s noir tales.

It was a dark and stormy night when Constance Rattigan, a once-beautiful screen star frantically knocks on the narrator’s bungalow door. In her clenched hands are two tattered phone books filled with names of long-dead Hollywood personalities. A few of those listed are still alive -- but each one of those entries has a red cross marked next to it. Who, Constance asks, could have sent these “Books of the Dead” to her—and why?

Enlisting the aid of his trusted sidekick, detective Elmo Crumley, the pair sets out to unravel the mystery, taking readers on a tour of the waning days of Hollywood glamour, when stars and their pictures loomed larger than life itself.