There's a Hollywood one never gets to see on Oscar night, the Hollywood of wannabes, has-beens, and never-weres. It's this hidden Hollywood that Benjamin Justice finds when he accompanies Alexandra Templeton - the go-getting young journalist he met in Wilson's previous novel, Simple Justice - to an open house at the home of the well-known teacher of screenwriting Gordon Cantwell. Templeton is on assignment, but the body she finds in Cantwell's garden isn't part of her story, and Justice suspects that the death isn't natural, either. The dead man is Raymond Farr, born Reza JaFari, and as it turns out, almost anyone at the party might have wanted him dead. The quintessential Hollywood deal maker, Farr's credentials were as phony as his name, and his scruples were as nonexistent as his credits. Justice - ever the investigative journalist, however reluctant - begins to nose around, and unearths a tangled web of relationships that lead him, finally, to the killer. Along the way he also reawakens a part of himself, the part he had kept buried, or preserved in alcohol, ever since the death of his lover from AIDS seven years before.