Wisecracking LA copywriter Binnie Bernhardt uncovers the deadly secret of a 1904 Hollywood movie that was never finished, all the while falling in love with its outsized characters, its multi-national settings, the history it made and the credit it never got.
When Binnie Bernhardt, stalled in her career and unlucky in love, gets a life-changing assignment at Paramount Studios to develop a feature called City of the Sun, she knows that her film is going to be about a 1904 Hollywood movie that was never completed. What she doesn't know is the diabolical reason why the 1904 film wasn't finished, and what she really doesn't know is that City of the Sun will have its own fatal ending.
In this multi-era historical novel, we join Binnie on her wild ride between present-day Los Angeles at Paramount, and the film’s 1904 New York, Hollywood and Berlin locations, as she becomes more and more enthralled with City of the Sun’s cast of characters, who are trying to: 1) make the first American feature picture and 2) perfect poison gas for the upcoming world war. Except, not everyone knows about (2).
When a rival producer is murdered and the Paramount project falls apart, Binnie impulsively sets off to Berlin to fulfill another dream, to finally learn to speak German. But in Berlin, she discovers that the story of her film and the story of her life still have surprising—and deadly—connections.
City of the Sun is about the business of staying alive in any profession. It’s about the movie industry before the beginning, when Hollywood was just empty sunlight and no one could imagine what was coming. It’s about how pictures get made. And unmade. The irresistible appeal of murder. And the unquenchable lust, in every era, for a great story.
