BOOK REVIEW: Hollywood Sinners by Peter Joseph Swanson

ISBN 1-60076-041-4

Copyright 2007, Stonegarden.net Publishing

In this world, there are a few girls with good luck, and there are some girls with bad luck. Hollywood Sinners, by Peter Joseph Swanson, is about a girl who not only has a black cloud of bad luck she also has phenomenally bad luck.

It's 1939 and Karin Panotchitch is a sixteen-year-old farm girl married to an abusive older husband who drinks too much, neglects her sexually, probably has a girlfriend and doesn't allow her enough money to buy groceries so she has to catch bugs to eat. Like most girls her age at that time, she has dreams of going to Hollywood and becoming a big star. However, it's not going to happen in this relationship. After a year of marriage, she's had her fill, and decides to smother him to death while he's passed out from another drinking binge.

Karin hops a bus headed for Los Angeles, and this is where the cast of characters gets long and interesting. Karin is portrayed as naïve, simple minded and uneducated. She also seems weak, because she faints dead away on a regular basis. (Of course, if bugs were your only sustenance, you'd probably be pretty weak, too.) Once in Hollywood, she changes her name to Carol Pan, which sounds more commercially pleasing. She meets a man, marries him, but a cop puts a bullet in him when he runs away. Then she finds a job as a dance hall hostess, with the pot-smoking madam, Mama Gravy, who likes girls, Carol included.

Carol does get a movie role at a smaller studio, for which she's not paid, and also has a modeling job, where her hair burned off in a freak accident. She meets the brother of her second dead husband, and ends up with him. They look for the cop who killed the brother, but in the process of avenging his death, he gets killed as well. (Amazingly, she ends up with another brother!) If you think everything she touches turns to rot, you'd be making a correct assumption. This is a recurring theme throughout the book. Somehow she manages to escape capture by the police, which may be the only good luck she has.

Swanson peppers the conversations with a lot of the slang of the era. However, I'm a fan of movies from the Thirties and Forties, and even I had a hard time following the conversations at the beginning. Once the reader gets used to the lingo, the book is a little easier to follow. Carol becomes a sympathetic character, in that we find out later that she was a victim of incest. (That part of her story is sad in its own right.) Although she comes off initially as being a dumb blond gold digger, inside she seems to have a big and generous heart.

Hollywood Sinners is an easy, quick read, and for the most part is very enjoyable. Although the storyline reaches toward the most unbelievable scenarios, Swanson's writing has a knack of drawing you in and making you believe.

I have only two complaints about the book. One is the ending. After having Carol on a non-stop roller coaster ride of one incredible bad luck occurrence after another, Carol's issues are resolved very quickly. It's almost a little too quickly. There are 185 pages of mass mayhem, mislaid plans, and lots of bullets and blood and two pages of resolution. By the end of the book, Carol had endeared herself to me. She was a very sympathetic character, and I didn't like the way her story ended.

The other complaint is probably not the author's fault, but the publisher. Little things like misused homophones (sorry, Peter!), and misspellings (for example, "dept" for "debt" and "Francis Farmer" for "Frances Farmer") were enough of an annoyance to my enjoyment of the story for me to mention it.

Hollywood Sinners is billed as Book One of the Tinseltown Trilogy. Since Carol's story is now locked down tight, I can't imagine what is next on the agenda. I can't wait to read the other two books when they are published.

I would rate this three and a half stars out of five.