Excerpt from Windhall by Ava Barry, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Ten o'clock. Someone suggested a game of hide-and-seek. All the guests ran to find a hidden space in that sprawling, somber house. Too many doors, too many windows, so many places to hide. One of the men began to count while the other guests vanished. One, two, three ... eighty ... one hundred ...

The first guests were picked off quickly, hiding behind the grand piano. Some of them had hidden in the hedges of the garden, the night swollen with the scent of magnolia and jasmine. Greer Garson, Robert Taylor, Clifton Webb; each returned to the house and poured themselves another drink.

It was mid-May, coming up on the scalp of summer. Heat lingered in the bones of the valley, malignant and cruel. Coyotes had left the hills and wandered through the streets like crooked phantoms, looking for something to eat. Nothing was sacred, nothing was safe. The air was sweet with the smell of eucalyptus, burning oleander, salty earth, and chaparral. That late at night, the city took on a magical glow, wavering between black magic and a spell of sleep. Two hours passed, and nearly every guest had been found. The only ones missing were Theo and Eleanor. Titters, rumors, and gossip: perhaps the pair had found something better to do with their time. There had always been rumors about Theo and Eleanor, working so closely on all those famous movies. If there was something going on behind the scenes, nobody would be surprised.

A waiter made another round with a tray of drinks, and talk idled. The first guests peeled off, heading home. Still no sign of the host and his leading lady. Three women remained, and two men. One of them made a lewd comment, a suggestion for how to fill the rest of the evening. Another guest complained about the heat.

And then Theo finally reappeared, standing in the door of the living room. His face was ashen, his hands shaking.

"There's been an accident," he said. "She's in the garden."

Later, after everything that happened, these words would become so famous that they were nearly always misquoted. They became a cliché, synonymous with broken Hollywood dreams and failed romances.

They found Eleanor in the bed of trampled rosebushes, lying in a dish of concave dirt. There's been a fall. Even in the darkness of the garden, shadows collapsed all around the cast of characters, they could see it had not been a simple fall. A bloody star upon Eleanor's chest, a badge of misplaced honor. The fabric had been torn.

One guest knelt beside her and tried to take a pulse.

"I can't feel anything," he said. "God, she looks awful. What happened?"

"It was an accident," Theo repeated.

Eleanor's head rolled upon her neck. A woman in a silk dress knelt in the dewy grass. "There's blood on her chest," she said, then gasped. "Eleanor!"

"Theo," the man said softly. "I think she's dead."

At some point, the police arrived, but nobody was quite sure who had called them. The guests were questioned, but politely, of course; the police knew all their faces. There were no accusations, not that night; the accusations against Theo would begin to leak out the next day. It was the stuff of movies, after all: a famous Hollywood starlet, all dark eyes and long lashes, killed by her strange lover.

That year would raise questions without very many answers. Theo's trial stretched on for the better part of a year. Private lives were thrown into question, and the members of Hollywood's upper crust were forced to descend from their secret world to take part in the trial. Alliances were tested, secrets revealed.

The first policemen to arrive on the scene said that the cause of death was immediately apparent; even though the medical examiner was called for, his presence was almost unnecessary. Eleanor had been stabbed through the back. Her heart had been impaled; she had probably died right away. The garden was searched for weeks, but ultimately, the search was abandoned. They never found the murder weapon.

Excerpted from Windhall by Ava Barry. Copyright © 2021 by Ava Barry. Excerpted by permission of Pegasus Crime. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.