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D W Buffa seems to have been expanding his horizons of late. His latest work, BREACH OF TRUST deals with the White House and the presidential election. To some, the work before this, STAR WITNESS, now in small paperback format, appears to cover an even more ambitious canvas: Hollywood. Buffa is a former defence lawyer and his fiction encompasses his previous occupation. Joseph Antonelli, Buffa's series character, had fallen in love with Mary Margaret Flanders -- said by some to be the top Hollywood actress of her time -- when he went to the movies. Her early, unmemorable movies verged on soft porn and were not successes. Stanley Roth, of Blue Zephyr Pictures, saw her potential, took her and moulded her into his ideal, made her into a star and married her. Now Mary Margaret (or Marian Walsh, which was her real name) has been murdered. Her naked body has been found, throttled and with its throat slashed, floating in the swimming pool of the palatial Hollywood mansion Mary Margaret called home. Stanley Roth is the only suspect in the murder and he hires Joseph Antonelli to defend him. Joseph, despite his ongoing relationship with lovely Marissa, is strangely attracted to Roth's assistant, the beautiful Julie Davies who does all of Roth's bidding and is seemingly in love with him. Roth has two partners, Louis Griffin, a man with every reason for his intense loyalty to Stanley Roth, and the money man, Michael Wirthlin, who detests and is detested by Roth. Roth sees life in terms of a cinematic masterpiece, always through a director's eyes. He is writing a screenplay called Blue Zephyr which he intends to be an exposé of Hollywood. Despite being caught up in the murder trial, presided over by a slightly seedy, perhaps tainted judge in a squalid and cramped courtroom, he works incessantly on this, his ongoing project. Antonelli, opposed by the rather vicious prosecutor, Annabelle Van Roten, feels it will be impossible to have his client acquitted, despite the fact that he is convinced of Roth's innocence. He digs deeper into the character of Mary Margaret and is disillusioned at the real person he finds behind the façade, one completely unknown to her admirers. But would she have pushed her husband into the ultimate act of her murder? Stanley Roth is the one for whom the story holds no mysteries -- other than whether or not he will face a death sentence. He makes it clear to Antonelli that he knows what happened on the night of Mary Margaret's death but is not about to share the knowledge. Buffa's books often have an enigmatic and even ambiguous air about them and this story, despite depicting the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, relates much that is enigmatic. The book is tightly plotted and the characters convincing, albeit containing a lot that is unpleasant. Buffa has the happy knack of capturing his audience and making them feel exactly what his protagonist feels.
Reviewed by Denise Pickles, August 2004
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