Tinseltown

In the early 1920s, Hollywood was threatened by a string of scandals?including the murder of the handsome, secretly haunted actor and director William Desmond Taylor, a crime that went unsolved for nearly a century. Now, in this fiendishly involving New York Times bestseller?hailed as "a must-read" by Liz Smith?William Mann draws on a rich host of sources, many untapped for decades, to revisit the case of the enigmatic Taylor and the diverse cast that surrounded him?including three loyal ingenues, a devoted valet, a gang of two-bit thugs, and moguls Adolph Zukor and Marcus Loew, locked in a struggle for control of the exploding industry. Along the way, Mann brings to life Los Angeles in the Roaring Twenties: a town filled with celebrities, party girls, and drug dealers?a dangerous place where the powerful could still run afoul of the desperate.