On a dismal evening in the previous century, an unnamed writer in
Venice, California, answers a furious pounding at his beachfront
bungalow door and again admits Constance Rattigan into his life. An
aging, once-glamorous Hollywood star, Constance is running in fear from
something she dares not acknowledge -- and vanishes as suddenly as she
appeared, leaving the narrator two macabre books: twin listings of the
Tinseltown dead and soon to be dead, with Constance's name included
among them. And so begins an odyssey as dark as it is wondrous, as the
writer sets off in a broken-down jalopy with his irascible sidekick
Crumley to sift through the ashes of a bygone Hollywood -- a graveyard
of ghosts and secrets where each twisted road leads to grim shrines and
shattered dreams ... and, all too often, to death.