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On October 7, 1949, dark-haired starlet
Jean Spangler kissed her
five-year-old daughter goodbye and left for a night shoot at a Hollywood studio.
“Wish me luck,” she said as she crossed her fingers, winked and walked away. She
was never seen again. The only clues left behind: a purse with a
broken strap found in a nearby park, a cryptic note and rumors about
mobster boyfriends and ill-fated romances with movie stars.
 Drawing on this
true-life missing person
case, Megan Abbott’s The Song Is You tells the story of
Gil “Hop” Hopkins, a smooth-talking Hollywood publicist whose career,
despite a complicated personal life, is on the rise. It is 1951, two
years after Jean Spangler’s disappearance and Hop finds himself
unwillingly drawn into the still-unsolved mystery by a friend of
Jean’s who blames Hop for concealing details about Jean’s whereabouts
the night she vanished. Driven by guilt and fears of blackmail, Hop
delves into the case himself, feverishly trying to stay one step ahead
of an intrepid female reporter also chasing the story. Hop thought
he’d seen it all, but what he uncovers both tantalizes and horrifies
him as he plunges deeper and deeper into Hollywood’s substratum in his
attempt to uncover the truth.
In
the tradition of James Ellroy’s Black Dahlia and Joyce Carol
Oates’s Blonde, The Song Is You
conjures
a heady brew of truth and speculation, of fact and pulp
fiction, taking
the reader on
a dark tour of Tinseltown, from movie studios, gala premieres and posh
nightclubs to gangsters, blackmailing B-girls and the darkest secrets
that lie behind Hollywood’s luminous façade. At the center of it all
is Hop, a man torn between cut-throat ambition and his own best
intentions.
Read an excerpt.
Critical
praise:
"A chilling second novel from
Edgar-nominated Abbott spins the conventions of noir fiction into
something fast, fierce and fresh ... a whiz-bang adventure through
Tinseltown's underbelly.
"With abundant style and a tight
convincing story, Abbott provides a retro thrill ride. ... Cain and
Chandler are evoked in the rough-and-tumble period language ... but
Abbott has her own voice, avoiding the genre's macho conventions, to
evoke the young women who live 'in a gasp of tension.'"
—Kirkus Reviews (starred
review)
"From its absolutely gorgeous,
period-perfect cover to its evocative portrait of the 1940s Hollywood
studio system in action, Megan Abbott's new novel is a sensual feast."
—Dick Adler, Chicago Tribune
"The book leaves no doubt that
Abbott is an artful practitioner of fem noir. This one will heat up a
winter night at International Falls."
—Jay Waggoner, Deadly
Pleasures
"I thought I was an ace student
when it came to Hollywood Babylon-type stories, but [with
The Song Is You] Megan leaves me in the dust. Leaves me in the
dust, throws her Lucky in my face and grinds it out with a dainty
twist of her stiletto."
—Laura
Lippman (To the Power
of Three, Every
Secret Thing)
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