“Michael Lister writes some of the best hard-boiled prose going. Nothing short of amazing.” — Booklist, starred review

Hollywood sells dreams. Mase McKnight makes nightmares disappear.

Los Angeles, 1945. Mason “Mase” McKnight is a private detective and fixer for Premiere Pictures, cleaning up the scandals the studio can’t afford to see in the papers. 

In Hollywood, everybody has something to hide—including Mase. And he knows where most of the bodies are buried.

Sometimes because he helped put them there.

When a naked dead man turns up in the bungalow of a rising young Western star, Mase’s powerful uncle and boss, Eddie Behr, orders him to make the problem go away.

Then Premiere’s biggest movie star, Dina Leigh, disappears. And her six-year-old son, David, is kidnapped.

Suddenly Mase isn’t protecting a studio. He’s hunting for a missing child.

And he may have to dismantle Tinseltown to find him.

Down mean streets and into movie-star mansions, across studio backlots and through smoky jazz clubs, from an abandoned motor court among the orange groves to the precipice of Point Dume high above the Pacific . . .

In a city built on illusion, some truths are dangerous enough to kill for.