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Book: “The Hurricane Blonde” by Halley Sutton
Publishing Info: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, August 2023
Where Did I Get This Book: I received an eARC from NetGalley.
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: A former child starlet is plunged back into the dangerous glitter of Hollywood after discovering a young actress’s body in this scorching thriller about the deadly sides of both fame and family.
Hollywood is a sickness. Few people understand this better than Salma Lowe, progeny of Hollywood royalty and a former child-star turned guide of the Stars Six Feet Under tour bus. Salma spends her days leading tourists around the star-studded avenues of Hollywood, pointing out where actresses have met spectacular or untimely ends. Salma knows better than anyone that a tragic death is the surest path to stardom. Her own sister, Tawney, dubbed the “Hurricane Blonde” for her off-camera antics, was murdered in the mid-’90s, and the case remains unsolved. Salma herself has sworn off acting and just hopes to stay out of trouble…until a real dead body is discovered on her tour, on the property where her sister once lived.
Salma soon realizes something uncanny: it’s not just that this woman is dead at her sister’s address–she also looks just like her, and is wearing Tawney’s distinctive hair clip. When the police investigation goes nowhere, Salma has no choice but to plunge herself back into the world she left behind to search for her sister’s killer…who may have just struck again. But the search for the truth will take her deep into the rot of Hollywood past and present, into her family’s own long-buried and terrible secrets.
Review: Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of this novel!
I can honestly say that the first thing about “The Hurricane Blonde” by Halley Sutton that really caught my attention was the cover. I mean, look at that cover! The unsettling neon pastiche framing an anonymous woman alone is very eye catching, but then reading about the plot of this book it just really clinched it. What says the flashy and attention seeking Hollywood culture more than bright colors and a gauche veneer and an unsettling undercurrent? I didn’t really know what to expect from “The Hurricane Blonde”, and while there were some things that didn’t necessarily reinvent the wheel, there were other things that really impressed me. And unsettled me.
In terms of the mystery side to this story, it’s fairly straight forward with some pretty familiar beats. Our protagonist Salma is trying to distance herself from the past traumas of her murdered up and coming starlet sister Tawney, as well as her addictions, her mental health spiral, and the way that all of that was so very public because of her status of being the daughter of Hollywood icons. When a woman is found dead on Tawney’s old property, and she looks just like Tawney did, Salma is suddenly determined to try and figure out how to prove that Tawney was murdered by her ex-fiancé, who is now a powerful director. The story is told in both the present as well as in flashbacks to the time right before and right after Tawney died, presenting clues and puzzle pieces as Salma pushes herself further and further into the dark truths of show business and the way it makes victims of ambitious young women and girls. I kind of figured out a few of the reveals pretty quickly, and Salma’s investigation was pretty much everything I expected it to be.
BUT, for the kind of easy to figure out solutions this mystery thriller has, its greatest strength is the way that it absolutely calls out the toxicity of Hollywood culture in regards to the way it treats the young women who aspire to rise to stardom. And how even in death they can continue to be exploited and dehumanized. We not only have the disturbing and tragedy filled lives of Tawney and Salma, the daughters of Hollywood royalty who ended up dead or in a severely damaging addiction spiral (respectively), but we also see the ways that other women in the story within the industry have had to contend with misogyny, abuse, racism, and how the public makes a spectacle out of very real pain. This books pulls no punches whatsoever, going to dark places with some very disturbing moments and reveals. It really pulls apart Hollywood not only within the story, but also in real life, making mention of other young women whose pain and tragedies are either still spoken of as lore (like Dorothy Stratten, or Dominique Dunne, or the Black Dahlia) or have been revealed many years after the fact (like Loretta Young being raped by Clark Gable and ‘adopting’ her own daughter to avoid the scandal of an out of wedlock child). Certain beats of this book take inspiration from all of this, and that is what makes it stand out.
“The Hurricane Blonde” is a relentless critique of Hollywood abuse and violence towards women who want to find success there. Be prepared for the darkness and the triggers that come with it, but it sets itself apart from other thrillers because of it.
Rating 7: A dark and bleak critique of Hollywood culture and the way it chews up women and spits them out, “The Hurricane Blonde” is a twisted thriller with lots of simmering anger.
Reader’s Advisory:
“The Hurricane Blonde” isn’t included on any Goodreads lists as of yet, but similar titles include “Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood”, and “The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Milicent Patrick”.
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