The eve of World War II. A Hollywood producer’s murdered wife. Her husband’s guilty memory of a shipboard romance. A stolen painting signed “Picasso.” French gangsters. A beautiful courtesan. A shoot-out in a brasserie. All these and more confront Private Detective Riley Fitzhugh as he travels from Hollywood to the Riviera, Paris, and London in search of his client’s vanished dream girl and some answers. Is the painting a genuine Picasso or just a clever forgery? Who is responsible for the corpses that keep littering his path and complicating the investigation? And whatever happened to Amanda Billingsgate?

Terry Mort is a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Michigan, where he received an MA in English and began working on his PhD. After grad school, he served as an officer in the US Navy. Deployed to Southeast Asia, he saw a variety of action there. Mort has written four nonfiction histories that were extensively reviewed in the national press and widely praised. He has also written several novels, one of which, The Monet Murders (McBooks Press), introduces the character of Riley Fitzhugh, Hollywood private investigator.