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Philip Damon is a successful band leader in 1965 and his late father was also a famous society band leader. Philip's band has just been hired to play Los Angeles at the fabled Cocoanut Grove, but his trumpet player has another gig, so he has to hire a substitute at short notice. He engages Buddy Bixby, to the skepticism of his colleagues. Bixby is a great player, and Damon owes him a favour, but he's also a junkie and the band anticipates trouble. Sure enough, almost immediately after they open, Bixby turns up dead with a needle in his arm. But the circumstances don't add up and Philip and his alto sax player, who used to be a cop, start investigating, soon getting tangled up with the intrigues of the Hollywood elite, with a background of the Watts riots. Peter Duchin, one of the authors of this work, is, as it happens, a successful band leader whose father was also a famous society band leader. We are clearly meant to infer that we are getting a true insider's look at the many famous people whose names are dropped throughout the story; and possibly we are. Mostly in this book they are just names -- inhabitants of other booths at fancy restaurants, customers in tony clothing stores, other guests at ritzy parties. I suppose it was meant to be clever, or titillating, or something, that many of the celebrities mentioned, Rock Hudson, Claudette Colbert, George Cukor -- now known to have been gay but closeted at the time -- are sort of retroactively outed. We insiders get to see them being gay at a time when the general public would have been horrified to learn of such a thing. More fundamental than the atmosphere question, the mystery itself is, unfortunately, very clumsy. I am not overly skeptical, in fact friends and family frequently mock my gullibility, but in this story not only can you see each plot development coming a mile off, it's also flashing its lights and leaning on the horn. Not very satisfying.
Reviewed by Diana Sandberg, March 2004
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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)
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