Set in contemporary Hollywood, Straw's slick debut opens with a promising setup. Bonnie Quinn, the difficult star of TV's Thanks for Sharing
, goes missing just before shooting the show's 100th episode, which will ensure a fortune in syndication. For help in finding Quinn, the program's producer turns to a Pulitzer Prize–winning photojournalist named Hardwick, who has taken to the sordid world of paparazzi journalism with gusto after getting in hock to loan sharks. Hardwick is surprised to discover that pictures he takes of Quinn's "dressing room–cum–residence" show lots of books by such authors as Dickens, Tolstoy, Joyce, Hemingway and Faulkner ("Most I recognized as the first editions I drooled over in the rare book shops near the Beverly Center"). But despite a hero with excellent literary taste, Straw, himself a Hollywood writer and director, delivers a routine thriller that reads more like a screenplay than a novel. (May)
