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Synopsis
Philip Marlow and Lew Archer would recognize a kindred spirit in Jimmy Gage, reporter for SLAP magazine, troublemaker by trade and inclination, and the hero of Robert Ferrigno’s sinuous new crime novel. While taking part in a Hollywood scavenger hunt, Jimmy meets Garret Walsh, a bad-boy movie maker in the truest sense: He’s just been released from prison after serving seven years for the murder of a teenaged girl. But Walsh claims he was framed and is writing a screenplay to prove it. He wants Jimmy to help him peddle it, sight unseen.
The next time Jimmy sees the director, he’s floating face-down in a koi pond and “The Most Dangerous Screenplay in Hollywood” has disappeared. Is Walsh a casualty of bad habits or has somebody crossed him off a list? And is Jimmy next? Combining nerve-shredding suspense and heat-seeking satire, Scavenger Hunt is an addictive read.
Book Magazine
Mystery writer Ferrigno (The Horse Latitudes, Heart Breaker) has yet to receive the popular acclaim he deserves. The author's seventh novel finds him at the top of his game. Probing the seamier side of Hollywood (is there any other side?), the novel concerns an eccentric director named Garrett Walsh, who is notorious for having followed an Oscar triumph with a conviction for murdering a teenage seductress. Upon his release from prison, he attempts to peddle a screenplay that suggests he was framed. "It's a good script," he tells ace scandal-sheet reporter Jimmy Gage, last seen in Ferrigno's Flinch. "So good it may even get me killed." An unlikely hero, Gage sets out to investigate Walsh's claim. As he makes his way through a moral cesspool, Gage encounters his doppelgänger, a villain whose identity is revealed to the reader long before Gage realizes he himself has become the target of murder, not merely the investigator of one. While there are plenty of twists on the way to resolving the whodunit, Ferrigno's plot is distinguished by a combination of caustic social commentary and black comedic irony.