Publishers Weekly
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Set in Hollywood, bestseller Woods and Edgar finalist Hall’s brisk fourth Teddy Fay novel (after 2019’s Skin Game) finds former CIA operative Teddy alternating between two identities. A few minutes applying makeup and putting on a wig transforms Teddy from Billy Barnett, a movie producer, to Mark Weldon, a stuntman turned actor. This makes it difficult for gangster Gino Patelli, who blames Billy for his uncle’s murder, and Gino’s henchmen to locate Billy, who keeps disappearing on the set of a new movie featuring actresses Viveca Rothschild (aka the Blonde Bombshell) and Tessa Tweed. Viveca and Tessa have become friendly, but they’re also competing against each other at the Academy Awards. The stakes rise when Viveca’s boyfriend, an Afghan war veteran with PTSD, murders a gossip columnist Viveca has a problem with, and it becomes clear that more than one villain is plotting violence at the Oscars ceremony. Readers will cheer as Teddy thwarts anyone who dares to try to kill him. Realism isn’t the authors’ strong point, but they know how to tell a fun, exciting story. Agent: Anne Sibbald, Janklow & Nesbit. (May)

Kirkus
Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Think the competition among Oscar nominees is a blood sport? You have no idea. Desperation at Dawn has snared Academy Award nominations for writer/director Peter Barrington; his wife, composer Hattie Barrington; lead actress Tessa Tweed; supporting actor Mark Weldon; and Tessa’s husband, Ben Bacchetti, who, as head of Centurion Studios, would bask in the award for best picture. Tessa’s nomination is nice for her, but it grates on Viveca Rothschild, the blonde bombshell who, determined that her own third nomination will be the charm, resolves to do whatever it takes to undermine Tessa, beginning with getting hired on Trial by Fire, Tessa’s aptly named new film, and planting snippy items about her in gossip columns. But that’s far from the biggest problem lurking beneath the tinsel. Viveca’s boyfriend, Iraq War vet Bruce, has PTSD and a much less nuanced approach than his girlfriend to stopping Tessa in her tracks. Even worse, crime boss Gino Patelli, suspecting that his uncle and predecessor, Carlo Gigante, was offed by Centurion producer Billy Barnett, hires a series of variously hapless underlings to find and kill him. As Billy tells his attorney, Peter’s father Stone Barrington, when he’s arrested for a rare murder he didn’t commit, “It seems to be open season on Billy Barnett.” But the predators’ job is considerably complicated by the fact that Billy, like Mark Weldon, is an alter ego of former CIA operative Teddy Fay, who effortlessly spots every Patelli employee early on, switches identities in a flash to escape them, and shoots them when he can’t. So the suspense in this enjoyably weightless tale is focused on the climactic Academy Award ceremonies. Who wants to bet that Tessa or Teddy will get killed or that Desperation at Dawn won’t sweep the categories in which it’s nominated? The perfect bonbon to pick up for distraction during those long production numbers at the actual Oscars. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.

Life in La La Land takes a downward turn for Teddy Fay, who assumes the identities of both producer Billy Barnett and stuntman Mark Weldon. Crime boss Gino Patelli wants to ice Barnett over an old family grudge, and Oscar-nominated actress Tessa Tweed, who stars in Barnett-produced movies, has become the subject of unfounded rumors. (Tweed is the wife of studio head Ben Bacchetti, son of New York police commissioner Dino, and their best friends are Oscar-nominated director Peter Barrington, son of Stone—the lead in Woods' longest-running series—and Peter's wife, Hattie, an acclaimed composer.) But Fay, a former CIA agent and rogue assassin, has skill sets exceeding those of the hit men Patelli hires, plus the intuition to anticipate a potentially lethal attack at the Oscar ceremony. Woods and Parnell mix crime with Hollywood glitz for a winning combination. Nonstop action and brisk prose, plus the senior Barrington in a cameo role, make for amiable summer reading.