Dream Town

Dream Town by David Baldacci is the third in the series of period thrillers set in the 1950s USA featuring Aloysius Archer, a WW-II veteran and a Private Investigator with a flashy car that he won gambling.

Year 1952 is on its way out and the City of Angels, including Hollywood, is dressed up in festive fineries to welcome the new year. Archer too is celebrating the new year eve among the bigwigs of filmdom, thanks to Liberty Callahan—a beautiful, upcoming actress and a close friend of his. During the course of the evening, the duo encounters Eleanor Lamb—an acquaintance of Callahan and a successful film writer—who is convinced that someone is out to kill her and hires Archer on the spot to investigate. Soon, before even the first day of the new year breaks, Archer finds a dead man inside Lamb’s house, gets knocked out with a blow to head by somebody, and his client—who hasn’t yet paid his retainer—vanishes without a trace.

As Archer goes searching for Lamb, he gets drawn deep into the showy, make-believe world of Hollywood as well as its dirty underbelly where drugs, sleaze and violence reign supreme. His quest pits Archer against some two-faced individuals, and some out-and-out nasty characters, getting him awfully close to dying multiple times within a short span of time. He also meets a few interesting, exceptional people, whom he tries to save from the evil ones, on his intense ride through the murky town of dreams where nothing is as it seems.

Baldacci, ever the consummate storyteller, recreates the Los Angeles of the fifties, the glitz and glamour of the Tinseltown, and the shadowy world that lies beneath all that glitter impeccably. LA and Hollywood of the era are ideal settings for action-packed detective stories and Baldacci leverages those to good effect with historically accurate descriptions of places, people and events. Archer is a solid character in the mold of classic PIs immortalized by the legends of American Crime Fiction; he is handsome, tough, witty, chivalrous and genuinely believes in doing good through his profession. There are many other finely crafted characters in Dream Town, like Archer’s boss Willie Dash, ex-PI Jake Nichols, ex-cop Sam Malloy, the lovely Samantha Lourdes—whose acquaintance is a pleasure—and the conflicted, enigmatic female characters that I won’t name here. The plot of Dream Town moves at breakneck speed right from the start until the action-packed climax.

However, while the descriptions lend authenticity to the setting, they tend to feel a bit repetitive after a certain point and impede the flow of the otherwise swift narrative. And, as is to be expected with such novels, there are some sequences that are quite unbelievable and a few deductions that are tenuous.

On balance though, the thrills and the sheer entertainment provided by Dream Town far outweigh the negatives and I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, as would Baldacci fans, Hollywood buffs, or any reader that likes a good yarn!

I wish to thank the publishers, Pan Macmillan, and the author of Dream Town for my e-ARC through NetGalley in exchange for my unbiased opinion.