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Reviewed by Keith Mbuya for Readers' Favorite
It is 1968. Jennifer Blair, an antiquities dealer, is in Hollywood, Los Angeles, partly for business, but her main intention is to seek answers about her mother Veronica’s unsolved murder. Veronica, a powerful publicist in Hollywood, had been found dead at a dinner party hosted by a prominent producer, twenty years earlier. While the police had treated Veronica’s husband as the main suspect, his death a few months later, declared a suicide, had only deepened the mystery surrounding the case. Jennifer believes both her parents were murdered. She hires private detective Clay Kirk to help her get to the bottom of the cases and perhaps get closure. As they both go around Hollywood, fishing for clues and answers from the guests at the infamous party, witness testimonies, police reports, and media coverage, they find themselves unravelling a web of secrets and deceit among Hollywood’s elite. What do they uncover? Find out in John Anthony Miller’s The Castle on the Cliff.
Balancing investigative details and the developments in the cast’s personal lives, Miller unfolds the plot at a steady pace, heavily relying on plot-driven conversations that are both upbeat and tense. The vivid depictions of the scenes uniquely captured the mid-twentieth-century Hollywood setting, lending the story a sense of nostalgia. It felt like I was back in the 1940s and '60s, experiencing the culture of California and Hollywood. Each guest is introduced as a potential suspect, and alongside the plot twists, this added a layer of suspense to the plot. The story exposes the dark side behind the glamorous Hollywood life, which includes secrets, deceit, manipulation, betrayal, fear, and jealousy. Clay is a complex, flawed character through whom Miller explores themes of infidelity, alcohol dependency, erosion of identity, role reversal in marriages, and implications of economic disparity on relationships, and more. Lovers of historical, mystery, murder, and sleuth novels will find John Anthony Miller’s The Castle on the Cliff an enthralling read.
