Blurb:
LA Confidential for the YA audience. This alluring noir YA mystery with a Golden Age Hollywood backdrop will keep you guessing until the last page.
"Don't believe anything they say."
Those were the last words that Annie spoke to Alice before turning her back on their family and vanishing without a trace. Alice spent four years waiting and wondering when the impossibly glamorous sister she idolized would return to her--and what their Hollywood-insider parents had done to drive her away.
When Annie does turn up, the blond, broken stranger lying in a coma has no answers for her. But Alice isn't a kid anymore, and this time she won't let anything stand between her and the truth, no matter how ugly. The search for those who beat Annie and left her for dead leads Alice into a treacherous world of tough-talking private eyes, psychopathic movie stars, and troubled starlets--and onto the trail of a young runaway who is the sole witness to an unspeakable crime. What this girl knows could shut down a criminal syndicate and put Annie's attacker behind bars--if Alice can find her first. And she isn't the only one looking
Evoking classic film noir, debut novelist Mary McCoy brings the dangerous glamour of Hollywood's Golden Age to life, where the most decadent parties can be the deadliest, and no drive into the sunset can erase the crimes of past.
Dead To Me is set in 1940s Los Angeles, so
while I was writing, I had to do a little bit of research on 1940s fashion to
make sure I didn't anyone dressed for the wrong era. The characters include
everyone from housewives to movie stars to tomboyish teenage girls to private
eyes, so I looked to old dress patterns, archival photos, and of course, movies
for inspiration.
There's a fabulous collection of Life Magazine
photographs of teenagers in the 1940s, and I used that when I was thinking
about Alice, the main character, and what she would have been wearing:
After World War II, one of the most significant trends in
women's fashion was know as the New Look, the name of Christian Dior's
spring-summer 1947 collection. The clothes were feminine, with longer skirts -
an antidote to the more utilitarian styles of the war-era. Alice's mother would
have adored this look:
I also see Annie, the glamorous older sister, adopting
the New Look, only a more youthful version of it:
Camille Grabo, the disgraced starlet, would have gone
with dramatic looks. I see her wearing a lot of black, too:
And on the other end of
the spectrum is Ruth, who doesn't care about fashion, who's described as
wearing shirtwaist dresses. This would have been a few years out of fashion,
and definitely more austere than what the other women are wearing:
And then there are the men. Of course, for Jerry Shaffer,
the tough-talking private detective, I went to the platonic ideal, Humphrey
Bogart in The Big Sleep:
And for Conrad Donahue, the devastatingly handsome but
dangerous movie star, I used Montgomery Clift as my model:
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About the Author
Mary McCoy is a librarian at the Los Angeles Public Library. She has also been a contributor to On Bunker Hill and the 1947project, where she wrote stories about Los Angeles's notorious past. She grew up in western Pennsylvania and studied at Rhodes College and the University of Wisconsin. Mary now lives in Los Angeles with her husband. Her debut novel, Dead To Me, is a YA mystery set in the glamorous, treacherous world of 1940s Hollywood.
