Love a Comeback

Book 2: TV Detectives Novel

by Ruthie Knox, Annie Mare

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Female Sleuths; LGBT & Pride

Synopsis

The latest novel in this sharply witty new Hollywood mystery series delivers behind-the-scenes dish, clever intrigue, and maybe even true love between actresses Bexley Simon and Sam Farmer . . .

Since the hugely successful reunion special for their hit show Craven’s Daughter, TV detectives Bex and Sam find themselves busier than ever—but, unfortunately, two thousand miles apart for long months. So much for quickly coaxing the long-simmering spark between them into flame. Finally back in L.A., though, all bets are off, and Bex and Sam are looking forward to some IRL time by the pool—at least until Bex’s sister Vic brings home a truly juicy bit of gossip garnered from her nepo baby girl squad . . .

Ramona Watts was once the Gen X It Girl—Hollywood darling, household name, muse, and coolest of the cool, until the “Icon with Issues” spectacularly crashed and burned. But now she has a new hit horror series, The Howling, and she’s bringing all her charm and 90s nostalgia to the role. Suddenly, Ramona Watts is a Name again—which makes it surprising when she fails to show up on set.

It's none of their business, of course, but Bex and Sam are curious. And they both have Hollywood connections left, right, and center stage, some of whom would love to see them sleuthing again. Plus, spending that kind of time together means another chance at a real romance. So what if they’re not actual detectives? In Los Angeles, isn’t everyone playing a role?

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

Crouching on a dirty soundstage, Sam Farmer tried to find the place inside herself where she had invited her character, Theomina, to live.

Small bits of grit dug into her naked kneecaps. When she adjusted her position, the boning of her leather corset caught painfully against her rib cage. Ignoring the discomfort, Sam listened for the voice of the dragon rider inside her.

Theomina had lost everything she loved. Her father. The witch who was the only mother she’d ever known. Her beloved dragon. She was tough, but she’d reached her limit. She was tired. Her heart hurt.

A tear raced down Sam’s cheek as she stared up into the ice-blue eyes of her costar, Chad Bevington. His eyes were the only part of him she could see clearly, since his face was covered in the green fabric of his chroma-key suit. The evenly spaced markers sewn into it would allow the CGI people to do their postproduction digital magic and turn him into the soul-sucking beast that Theomina was fighting.

It wasn’t hard for Sam to access the part of herself that believed Chad made a credible soul-sucking beast.

“Cut!”

Sam relaxed her body as much as she could in the dragon-riding leathers of her costume. She looked past the lights pointed at the studio stage. “Did we get it?”

“Your nose is running every time you cry.” The assistant director sighed at her clipboard. “Take five while we decide.”

Goddamnit. Sam had wrapped this movie almost two months ago. She’d wrapped it so hard, thrilled beyond description to be finished in Vancouver and finally able to unpack her suitcases at home in the Hollywood Hills. But compositing issues with some of the green-screen shots meant she’d been called to a borrowed L.A. soundstage at StudioHonor for reshoots at five a.m. on the same day her former costar, recent sleuthing partner, and current long-distance girlfriend, Bex, was finally coming home.

“When I need to cry on camera, I like to remember when my dog died,” Chad said, stretching his arms above his head. “Nice clean tears.” He winked at her.

Ugh. Sam didn’t mind so much that Chad was vain and entitled. Vain entitlement came preinstalled in this town. What she did mind was his tendency to try to control everyone and everything that happened on set. This was a man who’d threatened to call his “legal team” so often that it became an inside joke among the cast and crew.

Sam had said nothing about Chad’s behavior. Like the character she played, she was tough. She’d grown up with four older brothers and knew how to fight hard and dirty to maintain her ego under the attack of entitled boys.

Though Chad was not a boy. He’d begun his career as an icon of nineties cinema, and he remained as familiar to movie and TV audiences as popcorn.

Still. Not worth the energy.

After a long stretch of lights going on and off, crew yelling directions, and conversations between the director and his assistants, the main bank of lights went down. “Thank you, everybody, that’s a wrap!” the director yelled. “Get the fuck out of here, and stay out of my face until I see you at the premiere.”

Sam blew out a breath in relief.

“Except for you, my queen.” The director turned to point at Sam. “I’ll see you in a week.”

Sam gave him the wide, affable smile that was her trademark, most recently reproduced on the plastic face of her Theomina action figure. “Looking forward to it.”

She was not.

Making movies about magic was not a magical experience. Sam had adored Theomina when it was a postapocalyptic fantasy novel. She’d given copies to her nieces and nephews, and they’d been the first ones she called when she was offered the part in the film. I’m going to play Theomina! she’d told them over Zoom, and everyone had cheered.

Then she’d spent most of the shoot grateful beyond words that the novel’s author had promised to only ever write one Theomina book. No more books meant no sequels. Sam would never have to play Theomina again.

Or so she’d thought.

The author’s artistic convictions, it turned out, hadn’t stopped her from licensing the IP to Howell Motion Pictures. Just yesterday afternoon, Sam had received an excited phone call from her manager letting her know that blockbuster-maker Bradley Wilhite had attached himself to a Theomina and the Dragon of Shadows limited series in the role of Theomina’s romantic interest.

The one and only novel characterized Theomina as ascetic, with no other love than for her kingdom, and definitely not for a giant creep of a man who was more than twenty years older than Sam and didn’t believe in intimacy coordinators. But Theomina and her fictional principles were no match for heteronormative Hollywood.

Bradley Wilhite wanted Sam to report to his ranch in Telluride in seven days for a chemistry read, and she was expected to pack lip balm, drink plenty of water, and smile.

The director gave her a wave on his way out. Soon, Sam was surrounded by costume assistants who unbuckled her from the leathers down to the singlet and bike shorts she wore underneath. Chad was still being freed from his suit when she booked it to a dressing room to remove her makeup and fake blood. She brushed the special effects dirt out of her hair and slammed on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and a ball cap. They were her comfy clothes, designed for utility and escaping the set quickly. In her bedroom at home, Sam had something a lot more special laid out for when she saw Bex.

On the open-air top deck of the studio’s parking garage, she unlocked her Audi and flung her hat onto the passenger seat. The first thing she did after a long, desperately needed exhalation was dig her phone out of her bag, swipe past three million notifications, and tap the only name in her saved contacts that she’d marked with a star.

Bexley Simon.

“Hello?”

Sam winced. The familiar voice sounded distracted and like there were a lot of people around. “Bex?”

“Sam? Fuck! Hold on—I’ve got it, for Christ’s sake!” Bex said this last to someone else. “It’s a carry-on. I’ll carry it!”

Sam’s girlfriend was a small woman, short, curvy, and deceptively cute, with a face that could make a person fall in love or weep from across an entire theater and into the cheap seats, but she was not quiet. A Broadway theater critic had once admiringly mused that given the pair of lungs on Bex, her body couldn’t possibly contain much else besides her artist’s heart—and what’s more, she needed nothing but that heart and those lungs to keep herself upright, dancing, and singing.

Sam put the phone on speaker and turned down the volume.

“Okay. My god. Sam? Are you still there?”

“I am.”

Bex gusted a breath out into the phone. “Give me one second, I’m at the entrance of the VIP lounge.” The background noise dropped away. The sound of Bex breathing into her phone became all-encompassing, then inaudible. “Now I can hear you. Can you hear me?”

Sam laughed. “I can hear you. You must be at the airport.”

“Indeed.”

“LAX, I hope?”

“I should be at LAX, but my flight out of JFK was diverted to Denver because apparently it’s hard to fly through something called—a derecho?”

“Sounds fake.” Sam made her voice as loose as her hands, which she laid palms up on her thighs to keep from squeezing the steering wheel in bloodless fists.

“Doesn’t it? They made us get off the plane. I’m supposed to stay in this room they are calling a VIP lounge. At some point there will be a new crew, and I will get back on the plane.” Sam heard a loud rustling that she recognized as the sound of Bex digging through her bag for whatever gross nutrition bar she currently believed would solve her problems. “I should’ve taken Frankie up on her offer to drive cross-country with her, but I feel like I’m not made for road trips.”

“Absolutely, you are not.” Bex was a lot of things, but a woman satisfied with any kind of passenger seat was not one of them.

Sam loved that about her.

It was a helpful reminder. She held onto it and made herself take a few beats to recenter. She’d been looking forward to Bex’s return more than was good for her. Possibly, a little bit, Sam had been clinging to a fantasy of what Bex’s return would be like. Daydreaming about surprising Bex at the baggage carousel. Flipping through a mental carousel of potential outfits and imagining how Bex would react. Thinking up menus for a romantic evening meal they would share poolside, just the two of them.

None of that was going to happen, or at least not tonight. Even so, it was a perfect May afternoon in Los Angeles. Hot, but with a nice breeze. The sky was clear. She’d been released from the clutches of Theomina. Nothing was fucked here, as her brother Fergus liked to say. No one had abandoned her. Sam would see Bex soon.

Six months, though. It had been six whole, entire months since they’d been in the same room. Their work had pulled them apart, throwing their relationship into the kind of long-distance, not-quite-there-yet limbo that made Sam worry, sleepless in the middle of the night, that she’d left it too long and missed her one cosmic chance at love.

She and Bex had been together almost every day of the six years they spent costarring on Craven’s Daughter, a TV procedural about a kindergarten teacher (Bex’s character, Cora Banks) who takes over her dead father’s detective agency and teams up with a disgraced former FBI agent (Sam’s character, Henri Shannon) to solve one murder per week. Those were heady years for Sam, with an undercurrent of doomed pining for her fellow TV detective.

Then, after she confessed her feelings and Bex didn’t instantly admit to feeling the same way, Sam had fled, quit the show, and spent half a decade accepting any role she was offered, so long as it enabled her to avoid her quiet house and her own company (Sam’s stipulation) and moved her up another rung on the ladder of Hollywood celebrity (her management’s).

The result was that Sam had reached a fuck-you level of stardom, with the money to match. She was very rich and very, very famous, but without Bex, she hadn’t been happy.

They’d figured it out. Their reunion six months ago had turned out to be the most delicious do-over Sam could have asked for, and it wasn’t her fault or Bex’s that their schedules had been packed ever since. The commitments that kept them apart had been made long ago. Sam was a patient person. Level-headed. Extremely chill. Everyone said so.

“You’re doing the thing where you go silent,” Bex said. “So I’m doing the thing where I panic.”

“Right. Sorry.” She wasn’t brilliant over the phone. They’d suffered through a lot of calls at weird or inconvenient times over bad connections. They texted constantly at first, but small issues blew up too easily into big misunderstandings, and they’d been relying heavily on voice memos for the past few months. Sam had started to feel like she was sending letters by carrier pigeon from the warfront to her fiancée back home.

“I am disappointed. I miss you.” Sam delivered this line with, she thought, enough affability to hide her vulnerable yearning. “But we can’t control the weather. When do you think you’ll get in?”

“They seem pretty confident a fresh flight crew will be here in a couple of hours.” Bex sounded as crushed as Sam felt. “And by then, the storm will be past. With the time difference, I could be in L.A. in time for a very late dinner at Tatsu Ramen.”

“Perfect.” Sam bit her lower lip. She could feel every place her stiff costume had dug into her ribs, leaving injuries that would bloom into bruises tonight while she slept. Alone, most likely.

She rolled her eyes at herself. Give a girl a mom who wasn’t cut out for parenthood and a dad with multiple marriages, and she’d be stuck with abandonment issues forever.

“This is what we’re going to do.” Bex’s voice had gotten crisp, exactly like an older sister who’d had to raise her two younger sisters with literally nothing but pure faith and terrifying ambition.

“Tell me.”

“This plane is pulling away from the gate in two hours or less, or I am calling Kevin Costner, who happens to owe me a favor, and who I know is at his place in Denver right now, and he will get me to L.A. in his plane.”

Sam smiled at this pronouncement. At its heart, Hollywood was a small town, which meant it did a brisk commerce in favors, boons, and handshake agreements. One of the things that made Bex so delightfully Bex was that she kept track of every single one in a secret notebook she kept in a zippered pocket of her bag. “Why not call him this instant?”

“I have to be judicious about how I use my IOUs. But in ninety minutes or less, I want you at my house. I know you wanted to pick me up from the airport, but I’m assigning you to another mission.” Bex’s voice had become formidable. “Turn on the pool lights. Make sure there is a lot of food. Nothing vegetarian. Frankie’s taken me to every plant-based deli, café, and bar in Manhattan, and I am getting frail. Tonight, we’re going to eat a devastating amount of something extremely bad for us and listen to all of Vic’s major and minor dramas, and then we will curl up together on the big pool chaise and talk until we fall asleep, or a drone camera catches a picture of my thigh between your legs and my mouth welded to yours”—Bex paused to take a breath—“and the rest of us, you and me, will start early tomorrow.”

Hearing Bex’s description of their bodies intertwined had Sam blushing. She pulled at her lip, acknowledging a pang of misery that she and Bex couldn’t be immediately alone. Fortunately, it was a small pang. Bex and her sisters, Frankie and Vic, were a package deal. It didn’t bother Sam, who’d grown up in a family where privacy was scarce.

Sam’s dad had been married seven times. The longest romantic relationship ever embarked upon by Caesar Polonius Farmer, Oakland periodontist, lasted thirty-six months, and it was on supplemental oxygen by the end. In defiance of these familial odds, Sam had always hoped to find her person—her one person—and pair-bond until death. This meant that while the press liked to paint a picture of her dating habits that featured a revolving door of women, the truth was considerably more … governesslike. Proper. “That is a plan,” she said. “No contingencies?”

“No. This is the only plan. It is a good plan, and what’s more, it’s the plan we deserve.”

“It is a Bex plan.” Sam could easily imagine Bex in plan-making mode, her cloud of unruly auburn curls bent over one of her notebooks as she made a list.

“Yes. Which means it will happen—or something else equally remarkable will—and then I’ll make a new plan. But get ready. Once I’m back, we’ll have six weeks. A week for every month we spent apart.”

Except that I’m going to Telluride.

Sam pushed the thought and everything it represented down somewhere deep inside herself. At thirty-five, she was a couple of years younger than Bex. She didn’t feel ancient yet, and her paychecks told her she was far from irrelevant, but in this industry, everyone balanced on the knife’s edge of celebrity. The bigger her team got in response to Sam’s prestige projects and growing stature, the more that team depended on her work bringing in the kind of money and attention that fed the beast. It was why she hadn’t found a way yet to tell them that taking time off from her six weeks with Bex to schmooze with studio people, talking at and around another Theomina project, was not something she wanted to do.

No one had asked if Sam wanted to. Bradley wanted her to.

Sam didn’t doubt that after she showed up at his rustic abode there would be other things he wanted from her, one after the next until her six weeks with Bex had broken up and disappeared like the surf when it hit the sand. But if she even attempted to refuse the meeting, her team would be thrown into a panic. Bradley’s people would either start planting shit in the media about her or assume she was playing hardball and offer more money, which she wouldn’t be able to refuse once her people saw all the zeroes.

Sam had to go to Telluride. But she didn’t have to think about it, much less mention it, until after she’d indulged in at least a few days’ worth of quality time alone with the woman she loved.

“Sam?” Bex spoke her name with a hint of concern. “You’re acting—I don’t know. You’re acting. What’s up with you?”

She was staring through her car’s windshield at the studio building, trying to figure out a way to answer this question, when the exit door opened and her costar, Chad Bevington, walked through it. He’d changed into plaid board shorts and a loose tank that showed off his waxed muscles. His luxurious blond hair system was styled in the same tousled waves he’d sported since he was twenty.

A second man followed him out. He wore sunglasses and a black fedora that combined with the man’s slight, dancerlike stature to give Sam an instant sense memory of the Juicy Couture perfume samples shoved inside the celebrity magazines she’d pored over as a preteen.

That was Sloan Lennox.

Sloan Lennox, walking out of the studio with Chad Bevington.

Sloan Lennox talking to Chad Bevington, with one of his signature unfiltered Lucky Strike cigarettes pinched between his first finger and thumb (on a strictly no-smoking lot), gesturing to Chad with a trail of smoke fading in his wake.

“I’ll be damned.” Sam couldn’t believe her eyes. Seeing the two of them together was like watching a long shot from the classic film The Lights of Marfa, which had made both of these men legendary.

Together, Chad and Sloan had anchored Hollywood’s Ice Crew, a six-pack of gorgeous young celebrities who held court in the nineties from the Velvet Chair Lounge on Sunset Boulevard. Chad, Sloan, and a third leading man, Christian Stanstedt, became famous for their roles in various Tom Kessler productions opposite Ramona Watts, Macie Finn, and Juliette Draper.

But Chad and Sloan hadn’t been photographed together for at least twenty years, and probably closer to thirty.

Not since Juliette drowned.

“You’ll never guess what I’m looking at,” Sam whispered. She didn’t have to whisper—she was encased in an Audi Q8 with the air-conditioning on full blast—but the gossip value of what she was staring at made whispering feel necessary.

Or maybe it was Chad and Sloan’s body language. There was something furtive in the way Sloan kept scanning the parked cars.

“What? What are you looking at?” Bex’s impatience burned through the phone line.

“The Ice Crew, if you can believe it. Chad Bevington is in this very parking lot with Sloan Lennox. They’re striding across the pavement like it’s Lights of Marfa all over again. Sloan just flicked the butt of his cigarette at the pavement, skipping it like a goddamn stone on a pond.”

“Oh my God!” Bex was not whispering. “I need a picture!”

Chad and Sloan stopped in the middle of the lot to talk to each other. There was a lot of gesturing. Sam shot off a quick series of photos and sent them to Bex.

“Unreal! Chad and Sloan together? They loathe each other! Their feud is legend! I was obsessed with the Ice Crew in high school. I watched Karma Revisited so many times, I wore it out. They were my moody teen ideal.”

“I don’t think they were teenagers when they did those movies. They’re at least ten years older than us, and that’s only if they’re not lying about their ages, which Chad definitely is.”

“But wasn’t that the appeal? Depressive twentysomethings wearing too much eyeliner, pretending to be my age. I went through a phase where I wore brocade vests with leotards exactly like Macie Finn. I so should’ve known I was queer. No one who was obsessed with Macie Finn turned out straight, that’s for sure.”

“I worked with Macie.” Sam said this distractedly, absorbed with watching what was now a heated conversation. She took a few more pictures.

“Wha-a-at? How do I not know this?”

“Macie did a guest spot on Utopia.” Sam had started out in Hollywood in the ensemble cast of a hit sci-fi drama. She didn’t miss the tight and shiny jumpsuits that costuming had made her wear for her role as a half-android, half-human starship officer, but it had been fun to work with a big ensemble cast and some truly remarkable guest actors.

Bex made a tiny squeal. “Tell me what they’re like. Is all the dry humor real? Are they hotter in person? I feel like they would be hotter in person.”

Sam laughed. She was about to answer when she saw Sloan break away from Chad.

Then she saw Chad start walking toward her car.

No, to her car.

“Shit, Bex. I have to go. Text me when you’re getting on a plane, any plane.”

Sam hit the end button in the middle of Bex’s “Okay,” just as Chad gestured for her to put down her window.

“Hi there, Chad. What can I do for you?”

“Why are you sitting out here?” His eyes darted around the lot. There was nothing to see. She and Chad and Sloan were the only people on the roof of this parking garage, which no one could access but credentialed actors and studio employees. “Are you waiting for someone?”

“I’m listening to a podcast.” The Craven’s Daughter reunion special had involved Sam and Bex hosting what had become a notorious podcast, so Sam got asked about podcasts a lot by people who assumed she was an expert. She was not. But Chad didn’t know that.

The breeze lifted up the waves of his expensive hair, and he furrowed his eyebrows at her. There were tens of thousands of pictures of Chad Bevington making that same furrow between his brows, looking pained, yet artistic, yet hot.

“Did you see me talking to Sloan?” He said this offhandedly, glancing up at a seagull as though its screech had distracted him from his entirely trivial question.

Sam was not fooled. She had spent enough time with Chad in front of a camera to know what he sounded like when he felt a situation had moved too far beyond his control for his comfort. But why control this situation?

“I did spot you with Sloan,” she decided to say. “I love to see a man find a style and stick to it. The fedora and sunglasses still work for him.”

“Yeah. Whatever. I just mean we were having a private conversation.”

He was trying to manage this. “And I was listening to a podcast.” She raised her eyebrows as if to ask, Why are you making a giant deal out of it?

Chad furtively scanned the lot one more time. Sloan stood fifteen feet away, both hands shoved in his pockets, looking like a cardboard cutout of himself.

“Yeah. Okay. I guess you can know. I’m sure I can trust you not to say anything.”

Had that been a threat? Chad was still making an effort to sound casual, but he was also staring right at her, his neck tendons prominent. This was how he looked when he brought up his legal team. Sam raised her eyebrows again.

He sighed heavily. “Sloan and I did an episode of The Howling together.”

It took Sam a few seconds to understand how this statement connected up to Chad’s cloak-and-dagger paranoia. The Howling was a streamer-original horror series that had become an unexpected phenomenon in its first season due to the wry, winsome appeal of Ramona Watts, also formerly of the Ice Crew. Now filming its second season at Studi. . .