Mary Pickford Mystery — William Baer

In 1919, Hollywood film star Mary Pickford, the most famous woman in the world, is currently in between pictures and recovering from the Spanish Flu when a man shows up at her Malibu hideaway one night asking for help. The man, who's been shot twice in the back, then dies in her garden, and Mary makes up her mind to figure out what's going on. Assisted by her resourceful young driver, Billy Kidd, a rodeo rider and wrangler from Arizona, she soon finds herself involved in a series of dangerous abductions, abandonments, and murders that lead to San Francisco, Death Valley, then back to Los Angeles. Who's the mysterious man who died in her Malibu garden? What's happened to Suzanne Smith's missing baby? What's the involvement of Mary's close friend, the powerful Hollywood tycoon Adolph Zukor?