Love, Guilt and Reparation And Other Works 1921-1945

August in L.A. is a miserable month no matter what year it is, but August 1947 was shaping up to be a singularly awful one. The House Un-American Activities Committee had come to town and was making everyone in Hollywood, the Technicolor heart of L.A., nervous. And all the moguls in town were twitching because Warner Bros. had decided to take its greatest wartime romance, Passage to Lisbon, and pull a sequel, Love Me Again, out of it. Why were they twitching? Because this meant that the boys at Warner had a surefire hit on their hands. Warner wasn't so sure about that. They had received an anonymous note telling them that their screenwriter was a Red and with HUAC in town that meant trouble. So Warner did what any studio would do - they called in the Hollywood Security Agency to find out the real story and hush it up. Whatever it was. The Hollywood Security Agency specialized in the discreet laundering of the studios' dirty linen, and nobody at the agency was better at that than Scott Elliott, their newest operative and a one-time Paramount contract player. Elliott had returned from the war to find that nobody needed his services as an actor and had drifted into security work as a way of staying in touch with the movie business he loved. But the long odds against saving Love Me Again get longer when the screenwriter turns up dead. To find his killer, Elliott must untangle lives twisted by Hollywood and the war with only a bloodstained copy of the script as his guide. What he discovers is a trail of misplaced loyalties and secret dreams that reveals both the murderer and the mystery of his own future.