Once a Child Star, She Now Leads ‘Murder Tours’ in Hollywood

Salma Lowe, born into Hollywood royalty, has been through it. Before the murder of her older sister Tawney sent her spiraling into grief-fueled drug addiction 20 years earlier, Salma was a child actor on the cusp of stardom. Now, as Halley Sutton’s enthralling THE HURRICANE BLONDE (Putnam, 347 pp., paperback, $17.99) opens, Salma works for a company called Stars Six Feet Under, conducting tours of the houses where starlets lived and died in violent circumstances for “murder tourists.” Is it avoidance or deep immersion? Salma isn’t sure.

Then, not long after she learns that Tawney’s old fiancé Cal, a director, is making a film about her life and still-unsolved murder, Salma discovers the body of a young actress, Ankine Petrosyan, in the pool at the same house where her sister lived, “suspended in the water, twisting gently like a ballerina in a music box.” Ankine’s resemblance to Tawney is so uncanny that Salma believes there must be a link between their deaths. She sets her sights on Cal: She’s always believed he was guilty, and to prove it, she needs to finagle her way onto his movie set.

Sutton indicts our culture for its fixation on beautiful young women who died at the hands of others. Salma grimly notes how eager her customers are to “fork over $75 to let tragedy crinkle the edges of their cookie cutter … lives, sprinkling Dead Girls over their Instagram feeds like a game of brunch, brunch murder.”

I missed Joshua Moehling’s debut, “And There He Kept Her,” when it was released last year, and that was my mistake. WHERE THE DEAD SLEEP (Poisoned Pen, 320 pp., $27.99), his next book to feature the Sandy Lake deputy sheriff Ben Packard, is a well-paced whodunit that doubles as an evocation of Minnesota small-town life in all of its messy, dysfunctional glory. Nothing like a home invasion and a murder to reveal all sides.