Ali Karim was a Board Member of Bouchercon [The World Crime & Mystery Convention] and co-chaired programming for Bouchercon Raleigh, North Carolina in 2015. He is Assistant Editor of Shots eZine, British correspondent for The Rap Sheet and writes and reviews for many US magazines & Ezines.
The motif for this novel is curiously apt “Nobody Talks, but Everybody Whispers” because it comes from the pen of Hollywood Screenwriter Jordan Harper - the award-winning crime writer of this extraordinary book.
Thanks to the efforts of Faber and Faber London, it finally comes to the UK after its furious release in North America earlier this year.
Written in a terse staccato style like the work of James Ellroy; it plays like a knowingly-real thriller; a Hollywood Babylon expose that mixes the excesses of Los Angeles with the darkest edges of human nature.
The narrative details the collision of Mae Pruett, a public relations player with Mitnick and Mitnick Associates who keep Hollywood’s ‘bad news’ out of the fingers of the media, [both legacy journalism as well as the new arenas of TikTok, Instagram et al] - with that of her friend, former cop-turned private enforcer Chris Tamburro of BlackGuard Security.
When Mae’s boss Dan is murdered in what appears to be a carjacking outside a Hollywood Hotel, the PR Professional is tasked to take over her boss’s workload - which Mae believes led to his demise. But before the reader can utter ‘me too’, Chris Tamburro is assigned to investigate the carjacking that claimed not only the life of Mae Pruett’s boss, but also the murderer.
Unresolved mysteries start to coil, to coagulate. A murdered star, a Hollywood actress turned diva, drugs, brutality and of course the draw of fame for the young, dazzled by the promise of wealth and fame from The Beast that is ‘Hollywood’.
Are Mitnick and Mitnick Associates working in-concert with BlackGuard Security to conceal the unthinkable? And what lengths are they prepared to go to, to ensure the horrors of LA LA Land remain unknowable.
Mae starts to question her own value system in working for The Beast, and the cost to her sanity and warping of her morality, because everybody talks about how actresses are crazy, but nobody talks about how they got that way.
Jordan Harper’s Everybody Knows is the most energetic and most unsettling novel I’ve read this year.
The horror that is hidden Hollywood is on full display, beyond the whispers outside of casting rooms, or the support services that feed the beast, exposing us to what lurks in the shadows.
Prescient and unmissable.
