A former child starlet is plunged back into the dangerous glitter of Hollywood after discovering a young actress’s body in this scorching thriller about the deadly sides of both fame and family.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Halley Sutton’s The Hurricane Blonde, which is out August 8th!
Hollywood is a sickness. Few people understand this better than Salma Lowe, progeny of Hollywood royalty and a former child-star turned guide of the Stars Six Feet Under tour bus. Salma spends her days leading tourists around the star-studded avenues of Hollywood, pointing out where actresses have met spectacular or untimely ends. Salma knows better than anyone that a tragic death is the surest path to stardom. Her own sister, Tawney, dubbed the “Hurricane Blonde” for her off-camera antics, was murdered in the mid-’90s, and the case remains unsolved. Salma herself has sworn off acting and just hopes to stay out of trouble…until a real dead body is discovered on her tour, on the property where her sister once lived.
Salma soon realizes something uncanny: it’s not just that this woman is dead at her sister’s address–she also looks just like her, and is wearing Tawney’s distinctive hair clip. When the police investigation goes nowhere, Salma has no choice but to plunge herself back into the world she left behind to search for her sister’s killer…who may have just struck again. But the search for the truth will take her deep into the rot of Hollywood past and present, into her family’s own long-buried and terrible secrets.
The pretty blonde would be dead in three minutes.
She stood in front of the Biltmore Los Angeles hotel, wind snapping her black linen dress against her waist, revealing shiny Spanx and spray-tanned thighs. Ringed around her, a dozen true-crime junkies baked under the September sun, leaking electrolytes but not enthusiasm. Not yet. For three more minutes, Beth Short—better known as the Black Dahlia, Los Angeles’s most infamous unsolved murder—was alive to tell her story.
“I hitched a ride up from San Diego with a traveling salesman,” the Black Dahlia said. “A ‘nice guy,’ married. You know the type.” Melany Gray, the actor embodying the Dahlia, pantomimed handsy, skimming her palms over her bodice. My murder tourists laughed, nudged each other. Yes, yes, we know.
Stars Six Feet Under wasn’t the only tour company in Hollywood that promised an insider’s look at the macabre underbelly of fame. But we had something that set us apart. We had my Dead Girls. For four hours every day of the week except Mondays and holidays—though you’d be surprised how many people preferred spending Christmas with murdered starlets over their own families—I could bring the dead back to life.
“I told him I was meeting my sister. But he wouldn’t leave me alone. A gentleman.” The Dahlia rolled her eyes. “I sat in that lobby trying not to play footsy with him for hours.” She gestured to the Biltmore behind her.
I’d heard the story a hundred times, but I couldn’t help myself. I turned on cue with my tourists and stared at the hotel, glittering in the white sun.
In 1947, when the Black Dahlia was murdered, the Biltmore was the largest, fanciest hotel west of Chicago. She was class, and money, and all the promise of Los Angeles—that mirage of fame and success and good fortune—rolled up into one.
Now, nearly a hundred years into her residency—ancient in this city, which preferred its buildings like its women: shiny, new, young—the Biltmore was starting to show her cracks. Sumptuous carpets a little threadbare. Gilded frescoes dingy and studded with gray gum patches old enough to vote.
In the end, she had brought the Black Dahlia fame.
“By the time I got rid of him,” the Dahlia said, blonde strands escaping her black wig, “it was night.” Her voice fell to a hush, leaving us to imagine January 9, 1947, when Beth Short wandered from the lobby of the Biltmore into the dark, dangerous cold of downtown Los Angeles and disappeared. A week later, her body, cracked open like an egg, would be discovered across town by a young mother and daughter out for a sunny morning stroll.
Melany paused, letting us sit in our imaginations, wondering. Then she shivered, fluttering her fingers over actual goosebumps raised on her bare arms.
I peered closer, impressed. Actual goosebumps—a good trick. All the girls I hired from my mother’s acting school for my tour came with the Vivienne Powell guarantee of excellence, of course. But goosebumps on command—even Vivienne’s magic didn’t usually extend that far.
“Who knows what might have happened to me if he hadn’t been such a gentleman,” Melany said. “Maybe I would’ve left while it was still daylight. Maybe I would’ve lived a long life. We’ll never know.”
I nibbled on the edge of my thumb, biting deep into cuticle and sucking on the pain. Like every tour, I wanted to stop her there. Keep Beth Short alive a few more minutes. But that wasn’t the way the story ended. You couldn’t cheat the past.
I knew that better than anyone.
Melany finished the monologue I’d written, sharing theories about the Dahlia’s fate: The sons and nephews who came out of the woodwork with stories about bad daddies who might’ve killed her. Thousands of suspects. Never solved. I didn’t think it could be anymore, not really. The Black Dahlia meant something to Los Angeles, but only as a mystery. Even if they didn’t know it, people preferred it that way.
Melany stared at me, eyebrows raised.
Earth to Salma. I cleared my throat. “Any questions?”
In the back, a woman with sunburned shoulders and a puffy purple fanny pack raised her hand. I tried not to roll my eyes. I could guess her question. She’d want personal details about the Dahlia. She’d have her own theories about who she was, what happened to her, why it happened to her. I’d come to think of Beth Short as something of a litmus test: You tell me what you see when you look at the Dead Girl, and I’ll tell you what’s missing in your life.
“Yes?”
“Didn’t the brochure say we’d get a cocktail?” A low rumble of laughter moved through my group. Emboldened, Purple Fanny Pack smirked. “I mean, this is the Salma Lowe tour, right? I’m surprised we don’t get drinks at every stop.”
The laughter was louder this time. I scrunched my face into an almost-smile. “Funny,” I said. “I haven’t heard that one.” I gestured at the hotel. “Upstairs, the bartender has crafted a real treat—a Black Dahlia cocktail, special for our tour. Be back here in twenty minutes, or the bus leaves without you.”
My tourists lined up for their drink tokens, jabs at my tabloid past long forgotten as they held up their palms for the promise of lobby air conditioning, phantom taste of Chambord and Absolut citrus already on their tongues.
When I’d first started my tour, I’d made the mistake—oh, what a mistake—of believing my guests wanted to understand my own obsessions: the shadow side of the Hollywood spotlight, the darkness that beckoned for women who burned too brightly. She had everything until she didn’t. The Marilyn Monroes, the Jayne Mansfields, the Thelma Todds and Jean Harlows and Dorothy Strattens—none of whom lived past thirty-six.
But after five years, I knew what my riders really wanted: photographic evidence of being interesting—dark, complicated, ever so slightly twisted. They’d gladly fork over seventy-five dollars to let tragedy crinkle the edges of their cookie-cutter, basic-bitch lives, sprinkling Dead Girls over their Instagram feed like a game of brunch, brunch, murder.
Melany hovered near my elbow as I handed out the final token. I let the doors slide shut—that air con did feel good—then said, “Goosebumps on command. Impressive.”
“Really?” Melany’s face lit up, pink as a shrimp. “You were impressed?”
I winced. Actors were like puppies, eager to soak up praise and attention. And like puppies, there was something appealing and dangerous about all that tell me I’m good and I’ll follow you anywhere trust. It could get a girl in trouble. “You made Vivienne proud.”
She bounced happily on her toes, dress swishing around her knees. I rummaged through my purse, looking for the check I owed her, along with a tip—goosebumps deserved a tip—when Melany said, the words all in a rush, nasal Texas twang creeping in, “Then would you put in a good word with her? There’s this part I’ll die if I don’t get—well, actually, I already didn’t get it, but maybe there’s another part, and if Vivienne freaking Powell tells him I’m a good actor, Cal will reconsider—”
“Cal?” My purse dropped onto the asphalt. A lip gloss and a tampon, identical shades of pink, bounced into the street. “Cal Turner?”
Melany bent down, gathered the tubes for me. “His new super-secret project. The casting director won’t even release the full sides for auditions. It’s on an”—her fingers made bunny quotes around my tampon and lip gloss—“’as-needed basis.’”
Restricting sides—script excerpts actors used for auditions—was not the worst rumor I’d heard about Cal. The most dangerous director in Hollywood, one magazine had dubbed him—like it was a good thing. When I’d known him, he’d been a fledgling auteur with a leading man’s face and a bad temper. And my sister’s fiancé.
“So? Will you?” Melany’s face was eager, like a little girl promised a toy.
I’d always been a coward when it came to conflict.
I dug through my purse again, stalling as I fished out a floppy worm of orange sugar-free gum, thinking of Cal’s face as I chomped it. “Sure,” I lied. Even if acting wasn’t high on the list of things my mother and I no longer talked about, I wouldn’t have done it. Not for Cal’s film. “I’ll put a bug in her ear.”
Melany gripped my arm. I couldn’t look at her. “Oh my God, I can’t thank you enough. Salma, you’re a lifesaver.” When I looked up, Melany’s head was tilted as she watched me, her cornflower-blue eyes wide. “Don’t you ever miss acting?”
The gum fell to the back of my throat. I coughed. “Miss it?”
“I used to watch Morty’s House as a kid, you know. You were good. You were funny.” She hesitated for a moment, then said, almost shyly: “Iron Prayer is my favorite film.”
If I had a dollar for every time someone told me my parents’ film Iron Prayer was their favorite movie—Well, in a way, my family did have a dollar, more than a dollar, for every time I’d heard it.
But Morty’s House wasn’t anyone’s favorite show, except maybe mine. Playing plucky Polly Parker hadn’t required much acting talent besides mastering a salty sprinkle of one-liners, like: Gosh, Mr. Morty, don’t you know what to say to make a girl feel special! with an eye roll so big, I had to ice my forehead between takes. Morty’s House left me with a permanent bald spot behind my right ear from years of a pulled-too-tight ponytail, meager residual checks from our brief flirtation with syndication in the early aughts, and a taste for amphetamines in the form of producer-mandated diet pills.
It had also been the only time in my childhood when I’d had friends, real sleepover-truth-or-dare-MASH-until-morning friends.
Melany wasn’t done. “You can’t tell me Vivienne Powell and Dave Lowe’s daughter doesn’t have acting in her blood.” Melany must have seen my face, because she clicked her tongue, shook her head. “I’m sorry. That was thoughtless.”
Even though it had been almost two years since my father died, every mention of him was like a tiny punch still, another reminder he was gone for good. I still expected him to pick up the phone when I called. It was a shock to remember—like I’d carelessly misplaced him somewhere. But it was death that had been careless with me.
How you stop acting: Never live up to your family’s expectations. Delight the tabloids with a never-ending stream of bad angles and bad choices, the merry-go-rounds of rehab to red carpet and back again, the box office bombs and black sheep antics that sell more glossy covers than good news can. You won’t believe what Sloppy Salma did now! You stop acting when you sell more magazines than movie tickets.
And in the end, when you needed it most, fame meant nothing. It couldn’t protect you from the things that go bump in the night. It couldn’t protect you at all.
Melany just didn’t know it yet.
“I’ll put in that word,” I said. Behind us, a few of my tourists staggered down the lobby stairs, cherry-cheeked and loose. “Thanks again, Melany.”
I turned on my heel, blinking into the smoggy sunlight as I crossed the street to my bus. I folded my arms against the steering wheel, ignoring the leather scalding me through my sleeves. Melany gave the hotel one last look, then slid the wig from her head, shaking out her long blonde hair underneath it.
She didn’t need my good word anyway. She was Cal Turner’s type exactly.
I closed my eyes as the tourists mounted the steps. I didn’t want to watch them swaying into their seats like big drunk babies, yelping and giggling as they leaned against scorching windows, making a show of fanning themselves with a Stars Six Feet Under brochure. Ready to devour one more Dead Girl before the ride home.
I was always jumpy at this part of my tour.
As the bus rocked, I practiced my final monologue of the day. Tawney Lowe—an actor you might also know as the Hurricane Blonde—died twenty years ago, in the hours between 10:30 a.m. and 1:17 p.m. on June 16, 1997. But no, that was pulling a punch. Tawney Lowe was murdered in the hours between . . .
Murder. The word stuck in my throat like a clot of phlegm.
I counted backward from ten before I tried again. It was an old trick from the Betty Ford Center for Clean Living and No More Fun, where I’d served two tours: a longer stint from 2001–2002, as a teenager, and a shorter stay in 2004, a refresher course on the appeal of court-mandated sobriety.
Twenty years ago, my sister, Tawney Lowe—also known as the Hurricane Blonde—was strangled to death. Her murder has never been solved.
I’d said it before. What was one more time?
I opened my eyes. “Okay, everyone,” I said, glancing at my sun-mottled crew in the rearview as I nosed the bus back onto the glitter and rush of Los Angeles’s streets, backward in time to 1:17 p.m. on June 16, 1997, when my mother and I discovered Tawney’s lifeless body steps from her pool, “one last stop and then you’re home free.”
