Barbara Hambly

An entertaining look at the lives of movie stars real and imagined. The excesses of the Roaring ‘20s include murder. Englishwoman Emma Blackstone lost her husband in the war and her family to the Spanish flu. Her in-laws, religious Jews who were furious that their son married a gentile, refused to help till Kitty, her actress sister-in-law, hired her as a companion. Movie star Camille de la Rose, as she’s known in Hollywood, has scores of lovers, including the studio head.

Lizzie Pook. Simon & Schuster, $27.99 (336p) ISBN 978-1-9821-8054-6 Pook (Moonlight and the Pearler’s Daughter) delivers a brilliant historical about a woman’s search for the truth behind her sister’s death during an Arctic expedition.

Josh Weiss. Grand Central, $28 (448p) ISBN 978-1-5387-1947-3 In Weiss’s superb sequel to 2022’s Beat the Devils, set in a horrifyingly plausible alternate 1950s America, journalist Edward R. Murrow has faked his death to facilitate his covert leadership of the Liberty Boys, a group resisting President Joseph McCarthy, who defeated Adlai Stevenson in 1952, and the excesses of the House Un-American Activities Committee.