Charlotte Donovan is a researcher and executive assistant to a writer who specializes in celebrity biographies, mostly from the Golden Age of Hollywood. She's currently working on one about Jean Harlow, a 1930's platinum blonde who died tragically at the age of 26. When Charlotte goes to a local tearoom to meet her employer, Justine Taylor, it's only a short time before Justine dies in front of her.

Now Charlotte has been given the job of finishing the biography, but also cleaning Justine's apartment, and when she finds out Justine was murdered, she decides to find out who killed her and why. But when potential murderers start coming out of the woodwork, and it's apparent that whoever killed Justine is now after her, the stakes have been raised, and with the help of a handsome police officer and her best friend Kate, Charlotte will have to dig deep to find out the truth...

I wanted to read this book because I am a huge classic movie fan. So much so, I have hundreds of biographies from stars of the Golden Age, and thousands of classic films from the silent era to the 1960's. I figured this would be tailor-made for me. After all, a book about Jean Harlow and a lookalike? What's not to like? Well, this book, apparently.

To see my views, please check it out here, but not if you haven't read the book and don't want to know spoilers.

https://joannesbooks.blogspot.com/2019/05/the-jean-harlow-bombshell-classic-star...
.

All in all, when the ending comes and the murderer was revealed, it wasn't really a surprise as all the clues were leading up to it. I felt that the book was pretty depressing, and it had no memorable characters. While I would have loved a book that introduced people to the stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood, this one didn't meet my expectations. Two stars for the writing, but I won't be reading any more in the series. Maybe I was expecting more, but personally, I feel it is a disservice to classic Hollywood stars. Sorry. ( )

This is the first book in the Classic Star Biography series by this author.

The storyline involves a biographer, a murder in broad daylight, and a quirky amateur (and mostly clueless) sleuth who has Lyme’s disease.

While this could have been a fun and interesting read, the author was not able to pull this one off. There were just too many issues with her storyline — for instance, what publisher would allow an unpublished assistant to a world-renown biographer to finish writing her book? The assistant has Lyme’s disease, a disease that causes neurological issues and deep fatigue (among many other things), and yet, she runs all over town looking for a Jean Harlow look-alike and the murderer. The author’s characters lacked substance and therefore were less interesting and compelling than they could have been.

All that being said, if you like your mysteries cozy, movie stars of the 1930s, and don’t mind an inconsistency or two, then this is a book for you.

Thanks to Midnight Ink and NetGalley for an eARC. ( )