Private INvestigator Rich Hazzard receives an unusual invitation to tea, accompanied by a photo of a woman whose throat has been cut. A perfumed note reads: "If the photo interests you, please call on me at this address - CARA SHEARS."
The address turns out to be an estate on Sunset Boulevard. A mute bodyguard ushers him into a dimly-lit suite where portraits of a stunningly beautiful girl cover a gallery wall. The girl is Cara Shears, a silent film actress who abandoned Hollywood for Berlin and German expressionist films in 1933. Hiding from view behind a silk partition, she tells him she's dying from cancer and wants him to write her story, which also involves the woman with the slashed throat.
In a series of taped conversations, Cara Shears recounts her life, and it's soon obvious to Hazzard that he's dealing with a serial pattern of murder. He never sees her face on the other side of the silk portiere and comes to wonder if the person talking to him really is the one time film actress. What he doesn't know is that he's being set up as the final victim in a complex scenario of murder that traces back to Hitler's Third Reich.
THE SUNSET BOULEVARD DIALOGUES is an offbeat neo-noir mystery. While it keeps the noir voice, it has the architecture of a literary novel with a powerful theme as opposed to the formula driven mystery.
