"Can this struggling author solve a decades old mystery?"

By: David Handler

Genres: Mystery

Posted: April 23, 2018

Stewart "Hoagy" Hoag is an author, except he really only had one great novel. Now his agent wants him to ghostwrite a story about another one-hit-wonder author, Richard Aintree. Richard and Hoagy were once close because Hoagy dated one of Richard's daughters, Reggie. Richard has gone into hiding since the mysterious death of his poet wife in the 70s.

Now, in the 90s, Reggie and her sister Monette are estranged from their father, but also from each other. Both are authors in their own right, but Monette wrote a memoir claiming her father sexually abused her when she was a child. Reggie never believed her sister, and wanted nothing to with her after that. Monette has become a media mogul and is contacted via letters by someone claiming to her father. Reggie is also receiving similarly written letters, and everyone is trying to figure out who these are actually coming from.

Hoagy heads to Brentwood to stay in Monette's guest house to start researching his book about her father, but he gets caught up in the investigation of the mysterious letters. The more he researches and discovers, the more danger Hoagy finds himself in—not just from possible murderers, but also from falling for Reggie again...

THE GIRL WITH KALEIDOSCOPE EYES David Handler is a great mystery thriller, with a little bit of romance. At first, I couldn't get into this book, but after a while, it picked up. The way that Handler describes Hoagy's low-key demeanor reminded me of Colombo. There were several backstories to keep track of in this book, which could be a little confusing, but they all come together in the end. If you like a book with quirky characters, you will really like this book. It is the ninth book in the Stewart Hoag series, but not confusing without reading the previous books. Give it a chance!

Book Summary

David Handler returns with the first book in the Hoagy & Lulu series in two decades, a madcap mystery about an eccentric family of influential artists, and how Hollywood's obsession with the spotlight can sometimes turn deadly— full of delicious LA folklore and 90s nostalgia.

One-hit-wonder author turned ghostwriter and amateur sleuth Stewart "Hoagy" Hoag and his persnickety basset hound Lulu are back for their first appearance in twenty years….

The year is 1992. Clinton is on the road to the white house, Kurt Cobain fever has taken over America's youth, and cell phones are the size of your head. Hoagy is pulled back into the orbit of the brilliant, erratic, maddening poet Reggie Aintree, whom he was deeply in love with before he met his ex, Merilee Nash. Reggie and her sister Monette believe they've been contacted by their long-lost father from whom they’ve been estranged for decades. Richard Aintree wrote one captivating novel that is read in every high school English class. But he fell off the face of the earth after his wife (the girls' mother), a distinguished American poet in her own right, committed suicide on a bad acid trip in the '70s.

To complicate matters further, Monette found her first taste of fame at twenty-years-old when she published Father Didn't Know Best, a memoir falsely accusing her father of sexual abuse. Though she tried to recant her accusations in subsequent books, the damage was done. She and her sister Reggie have not spoken since. Now, Monette is a media mogul whose empire is crumbling, and Reggie runs the Root- Chakra Institute in Upstate New York. Recently, both sisters have received mysterious typewritten letters from their father.

Into this crazy mix comes Hoagy, who is staying in the pool house at Monette's Brentwood mansion after he’s been hired as a ghostwriter to document the tell-all book that could result from this mess. But when murder strikes, it’s more important than ever for him to pull fact from fiction as he races to catch a clever, sinister killer.

The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes by David Handler

The Girl with Kaleidoscope Eyes

by: David Handler

Stewart Hoag Mystery

William Morrow Paperbacks
August 1, 2017
On Sale: August 15, 2017
Featuring:
288 pages
ISBN: 0062412841
EAN: 9780062412843
Kindle: B01MXNXA75
Paperback / e-Book

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