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Denise Hamilton

The Last Embrace Paperback – 1 July 2008

by Denise Hamilton (Author)

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Los Angeles 1949. A city of big dreams and dark shadows...

Lily Kessler, a former stenographer and spy for the OSS, comes to Los Angeles to find her late fiancé's sister Kitty, an actress who is missing from her Hollywood boardinghouse. The next day, Kitty's body is found in a ravine below the Hollywood sign. Unimpressed by the local police, Lily investigates on her own. As she delves into Kitty's life, she encounters fiercely competitive starlets, gangsters, an eccentric special-effects genius, exotic denizens of Hollywood's nightclubs, and a homicide detective who might distract her from her quest for justice. But the landscape in L.A. can shift kaleidoscopically, and Lily begins to see how easily a young woman can lose her balance and fall prey to the alluring city's dangers....

With vibrant characters and unerring insight into the desires and dark impulses that can flare between men and women, The Last Embrace showcases Denise Hamilton at the height of her storytelling powers as she transports readers to a fascinating, transitional time in one of America's most beguiling cities.

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Product details

Publisher : Scribner Book Company (1 July 2008)
Language : English
Paperback : 384 pages
ISBN-10 : 0743296737
ISBN-13 : 978-0743296731
Dimensions : 13.97 x 2.54 x 21.43 cm

Customer Reviews:
5 ratings

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Review

...an engaging heroine and a cast of quirky supporting characters who seem to have walked off the set of Sunset Boulevard. -- Booklist

Hamilton captures Los Angeles in a way that's comparable to the skills of Michael Connelly and Robert Crais. -- South Florida Sun-Sentinel

Her reputation for Chandleresque dialog and impeccable historical detail is strongly supported in this highly readable and entertaining story. -- Library Journal

Nobody can do multicultural Los Angeles better than Denise Hamilton. -- The Denver Post

One great ride into classic L.A. noir. Smart, passionate, and filled with heart. -- Robert Ferrigno

So much freshness and sass...comparisons with Raymond Chandler aren't too far out of line. -- Los Angeles Times Book Review

About the Author

Denise Hamilton is a writer-journalist whose work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Cosmopolitan, and The New York Times and is the author of five acclaimed Eve Diamond crime novels, Prisoner of Memory, Savage Garden, Last Lullaby, Sugar Skull, and The Jasmine Trade, all of which have been Los Angeles Times bestsellers. She is also the editor of and a contributor to the short story anthology Los Angeles Noir, winner of the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association Award for Best Mystery of 2007. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two young children. Visit her at www.denisehamilton.com.

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Matt Mansfield

Novel Noir

Reviewed in the United States on 7 November 2013

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This is the type of book that makes for good reading on a long trip or at a beach somewhere with lazy, sun-drenched days to enjoy. The cocktail served up by Denise Hamilton in "The Last Embrace" is a mix of characters with concealed agendas, mysterious actions challenging to follow at times and the overripe post-World War II atmosphere of pre-Rat Pack Los Angeles.

It is late 1949, almost three years after the infamous, unsolved Black Dahlia murder covered in a speculative novel by James Elroy and the 2002 Brian De Palma film of the same name. Lilly Kessler, a former OSS staff member, arrives in her former hometown to locate her deceased fiancé's sister, Doreen Croggan, now known by her film name, Kitty Hayden. But she discovers the little sister has also just ceased. In need of a mission Lilly promises the mother that she will find out who killed Kitty.

Before long - actually in a matter of hours - Lilly is living in Kitty's former apartment with other would-be starlets, a curious landlady and various characters on the make or prowl. Passing references to Frank Sinatra, Gene Tierney, Kirk Douglas, Al Viola (remember his guitar?) are mixed in with familiar neighborhood, street and product brand names from the time to add authenticity. The West Hollywood landmark, Formosa Cafe, seen in the Academy Award winning movie, "LA Confidential," makes a cameo appearance as well as the Jack Dragna-Mickey Cohen rival gang members, including Lana Turner's favorite, Johnny Stompanato. The requisite cynical members of the local constabulary also make their presence known and, before long, the bodies are piling up at a lively clip under Max Sennett's pre-restoration "Hollywood" stunt sign. Newspapers are covering the action and dub the unsolved murders as the work of "The Scarlet Sandal" murderer, homage to the Black Dahlia case.

Ms. Hamilton has done a fair amount of homework about the period and details - even a reference to a "cornflower blue" dress, a Raymond Chandler favorite expression for the eyes of his femmes fatales. And, while some details can be nitpicked such as Kitty's OSS background (a former real OSS file clerk, Julia Child, is probably spinning at the liberties taken), a certain leeway has to be allowed for the character and plot line to work within the period. The real challenge at times is the overdone descriptions of the Los Angeles (and its satellite town) environments. It seems hard to bring in the lush life when the noir genre was so spare and hardboiled. The seaminess was in the characters, less the surrounds, such as depicted in the much under-rated 1947 noir movie, "The Lady from Shanghai," with Rita Hayworth and Orson Welles.

So sit back, take a sip of your favorite beverage and slip into something comfortable like the pages of this tale.

One person found this helpful

B. Velten

Good premise, only fair execution

Reviewed in the United States on 6 June 2012

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The Last Embrace started out with a great idea; a former file clerk/OSS spy trying to adjust to post-war life in the US after a number of years in Europe working undercover as a spy. This sounded like a variation on the hard-boiled detective, jaded with seeing the seamy side of life. Unfortunately, this character only lasted for the first few chapters. As the book went on, the spy started acting more like a file clerk; bungling her way through unraveling the mystery of the missing actress, unable to maintain her cover, and allowing herself to be isolated with potential suspects. Seems like she would have had a very short career as a spy.

The suspects were the usual stereotypes; the sinister landlady, the mob boss, the crooked cop and even the thwarted suitor. In the end the killer turned out to be a wild card with a very shaky motive.

This would have been better written in the first person as in many of the other noir fiction books and as the author's Eve Diamond mysteries are written. This book, while interesting, reads like an early attempt at novel writing pulled out of the bottom desk drawer at a publisher's urging. I gave it 3 stars because she did manage to evoke 1940's LA in the telling of an interesting but flawed story. The female spy in the post-war era would still make a great book, just not this one.

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S. Hammel

Disappointing Los Angeles Noir...

Reviewed in the United States on 1 December 2008

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Reviews of this novel suggested a Los Angeles noir novel with echoes of Raymond Chandler. But I found it frustrating and disappointing on multiple levels.

Hamilton writes skillful prose and creates an interesting story, but far from the tough-guy language of Chandler and traditional noir there is a girlish quality that runs through the voice of this story. Her heroine is a former OSS WW II spy, which is a promising idea. But rather than convincingly using skills she acquired as a spy, she barrels around like an amateur sleuth putting herself into danger time and again, showing little judgment.

As the story moves along coincidences pile up upon one another, characters cross paths too conveniently and as we get toward the later portion of the novel, clues and leads that were readily discoverable much earlier in the story conveniently emerge when it suits the narratives purposes. Hamilton tale becomes increasingly convoluted, so that she ends up stumbling over herself explaining things away. Soon it becomes clear that much of the action of the novel was simply a series of convoluted red herrings that simply pad the story's length. And most frustratingly once we reach the unmasking of the real killers and the mystery's solution, it has little to do with most of the story we've just read. Aside from being somewhat out of left field...it feels minor and disappointing.

Hamilton also disregards the construction of most noir detective fiction...and most mysteries by intercutting the point-of-view amongst several major characters and even veers off to include moments with minor characters. This also is a frustrating direction for a mystery. In for instance Micheal Connelly's Bosch novels, we remain in Bosch's perspective, discovering clues and leads as he does. But by diverting to other points of view the reader becomes aware that the mystery is being created by the AUTHOR WITHOLDING INFORMATION. In an interview at the end of the book, Hamilton says she used this narrative structure because she envisioned the book as movie. Maybe better to envision the book as book! Clearly, she seems more influenced by noir cinema than noir fiction.

Hamilton also allowed some anachronisms to creep into her 1949. Odd, for a writer who spent time researching the stop action animation techinque that went into the movie MIGHTY JOE YOUNG and spends pages explaining this. But at one point one character refers to another as Ms...at least two decades before that word had been invented. At another point a character uses having been at a tv 'taping' -- about a decade before videotape techhology was invented and a good 15 years before this was a common place way of shooting tv shows. At another point a character pulls a reel-to-reel tape recorder out of a drawer -- a nice trick in an era when the average reel-to-reel recorder was the size of a suitcase.

6 people found this helpful

Pat, LA Native

The Last Embrace

Reviewed in the United States on 16 September 2008

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As a 3rd generation Angeleno, I looked forward to reading about streets and scenes my mother often referenced. I was disappointed. However, the story was enough to keep me looking for Silver Lake, more specifics about Hollywood Blvd. and the people who lived in those romantic homes as you wound around and up to the Hollywood Sign. I was not "glued", but it helped lull me to sleep at night and in the end, I finished with a yawn.

One person found this helpful

Amy E. Condit

Noir set in 40s era l.a.

Reviewed in the United States on 4 May 2013

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Happy to get this most interesting book about a true crime case set in the most interesting era in L.A.

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