In "Stardust," Kanon rescues postwar Los Angeles from noir clichés. Ben Collier, the G.I. son of a famous director, finds himself in the movie business after the mysterious death of his screenwriter brother. Blacklisting is just starting to poison the Hollywood dream, and the brother's possible involvement with Communists deepens the intrigue around his death. With a menschy studio head as his protector and his brother's widow as his forbidden love interest, Ben enters the Hollywood scene while being targeted by whoever had it in for his brother. This may sound like a basic thriller formula, but Kanon operates with an intelligence that briskly evokes the atmosphere of a vanished era. Among others, he brings to life German émigrés and actual Los Angeles exiles, including Alma Mahler and Bertolt Brecht. There's also a nefarious Red-hating congressman. Hovering over it all, like a freakish fog off the Pacific, is the shadow of the Holocaust, its enormity only now becoming apparent. Kanon, a romantic at heart, makes the case that in the end honest labor, not malicious conniving, creates the magic of the movies. He even tweaks history by giving his studio head a knockout moment exposing anti-Communist deceit.

James Ellroy fans will find a lot to like in this gritty look at post-WWII Hollywood from Edgar-winner Kanon (Los Alamos). Ben Collier, recently returned to the U.S. from service in the Signal Corps in Europe, travels to California after his sister-in-law, Liesl, informs him that his director brother, Danny, has suffered a serious fall from a hotel window. Was it an accident or a suicide attempt? Ben arrives in time to witness his brother briefly emerge from a coma, but soon afterward Danny dies. While Liesl believes the suicide theory, Ben suspects someone pushed Danny out the window and turns amateur detective to identify the culprit. In a noirish twist, the widowed Liesl comes on to Ben. The stakes rise after Ben learns Danny was playing a part in an anticommunist crusade a congressman is launching against the film industry. Kanon perfectly balances action and introspection, while smoothly integrating such real-life figures as actress Paulette Goddard into the plot. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Set in 1945 Hollywood, Kannon's fifth novel-following Alibi (2005), also available from Recorded Books-successfully melds historical fiction with noir. Ben Collier grows to suspect his brother Danny's suicide may have been a murder, becomes entangled with Danny's femme fatale wife, and discovers troubling secrets about his family's past. While some may be frustrated with the lapses in action in the novel's middle, most will be enchanted by the atmosphere of intrigue and glamour. Tony Award winner Boyd Gaines so skillfully voices each character, including the women, that it was surprising for this reviewer to learn he is the sole narrator. Recommended for public libraries; of special interest to fans of Graham Greene and James Ellroy. [Includes an enhanced CD featuring a video interview with the author; the Atria: S. & S. hc was recommended "for anyone interested in Hollywood in the late 1940s or the film industry's response to the era's congressional witch hunts," LJ 8/09.-Ed.]-Carly Wiggins, Consolidated Community Schs. Lib., Newberry, MI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

In his fifth novel, Kanon returns to his signature theme: the postwar world and the lingering effects of the so-called Good War on those who fought it and those who endured its horrors. The war left its most visible scars in Berlin, of course, the setting of Kanon's The Good German (2001); in Venice, where Alibi (2005) took place, the landscape was relatively undisturbed, but the survivors carried their own internal burdens. That's true even in Hollywood, where Ben Collier arrives to oversee production of an army documentary on the death camps and to attend his brother, in a coma after what's being called either an accident or a suicide attempt. After his brother dies, Ben is thrown into the German Jewish expatriate community writers, musicians, and actors who, like his own mother, escaped the Nazis while it was still possible to leave. Convinced that his brother was murdered, Ben attempts to track back what happened and finds trouble on multiple fronts: the labor unrest that is gripping Hollywood; his brother's possible involvement in the seeds of what would shortly become Joseph McCarthy's reign of terror; and, on a personal level, the sexual attraction drawing him to his dead brother's wife. Kanon manipulates his plot and setting expertly, evoking both a James Ellroy-like postwar noir atmosphere and, at the same time, capturing the surface glamour of Hollywood's fading golden age (Paulette Goddard and other real-life figures make cameos). If this juxtaposition of noir sensibility against Tinseltown melodrama sometimes fails to meld smoothly, the novel nevertheless re-creates a time and a place with pinpoint accuracy and reminds us once again that the wounds of war take time to heal.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2009 Booklist

Kanon's atmospheric, character-driven latest (Alibi, 2005, etc.) comes within a whisker of being flawless. Hollywood, 1945: a place where an observer as shrewd as Ben Collier could easily conclude, "Nothing can lie like a smile." Lots of smilers, lots of lies, lots of reasons for Ben not to believe that his brother Danny's death was either a suicide or an accident, though both have been put forward as explanations. Still in uniform, Signal Corps officer Ben arrives in Hollywood on assignment to make a Nazi death-camp documentary for the army. He'll work under the auspices of Continental Films and Sol Lasner, its pepper-pot founder and boss. But there's a subtext, of course. In Germany, where they were boys, Ben adored his charismatic older brother. Danny's charm, unflagging energy and zest for life were givens in the Kohler household. Suicide? Never! Accident? Well, perhaps, but Ben can't be convinced of its likelihood. Though circumstances, mostly those attendant on being a Jew under Hitler, uprooted and eventually separated them, the brothers had remained in touch as best they could, while leading far-flung and disparate lives: Ben a soldier, Danny a movie producer. A movie producer with enigmatic sides to him, Ben discovers as his investigation intensifies. There's the mystery surrounding his role as husband, for instance, to the beautiful Liesl, who will come to loom large in Ben's own life. There are the unsettling ways Danny seems connected to the infamous Congressional Red-baiting that's breaking so many careers and hearts now that the Russians are no longer U.S. allies. His brother had bitter enemies, Ben soon realizes. Which one was a murderer? Yes, it's too long, resulting in a certain noticeable softness around the middle, but time and place are so vividly evoked, and the writing is so strong, that most readers will be of a mind to forgive. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.