Saving Susy Sweetchild is the third Hollywood historical mystery by Barbara Hambly. Released 3rd Sept 2024 by Severn House, it's 256 pages and is available in hardcover and ebook formats. Paperback format due out 2nd quarter 2025 from the same publisher. It's worth noting that the ebook format has a handy interactive table of contents as well as interactive links and references throughout.

More intrigue, kidnapping, and murder in Hollywood's golden age. Academically gifted, impoverished, widowed Emma Blackstone is once again called on to help, this time to locate a missing child actress and her mother who've been kidnapped.

Hambly is an incredible prolific and prodigiously gifted writer, whatever genre she turns her talents to. This one is no exception. It's remarkable how different this series is from her other well known series (Dr. Benjamin January, for example).

Although the mystery and denouement work well enough as a standalone, there are some minor spoilers and developments from earlier books which will affect reading if the series is read out of order (nothing story-breaking, but they are there).

Four and a half stars. It would be an excellent choice for public library acquisition, home reading, or gifting. With three books extant in the series, it would also be a good choice for a binge/buddy read.

Disclosure: I received an ARC at no cost from the author/publisher for review purposes.

If you’ve picked this one up without having read the previous two books, while I’d advise you go back to the first book in the series, Scandal in Babylon, as it’s a great read – you won’t unduly flounder if you decide to forge ahead anyway. Hambly does an excellent job of providing necessary details without hampering the pace.

Hambly is outstanding at setting the scene. The giddy, hedonistic lifestyle of those working in the film industry – including the punishing hours, blatant abuse of anyone further down the food chain and the free access to drink and drugs, despite the Prohibition, is wonderfully portrayed. She also provides fabulous descriptions of the desert at night and the film locations so that I not only could vividly imagine the setting – I could also smell it.

Emma is increasingly unhappy in this story. She is shocked at how hard little Susy Sweetchild is having to work – and what happens to her if she tries to protest. Her actress mother is ruthless in exploiting her small daughter, who is still a major box office draw and has been so since the age of three. But when the two of them are kidnapped, the studio is in turmoil as they wait for a ransom demand – especially as the recent high-profile cases featuring child abductions for cash have all gone tragically wrong. I would mention that while there’s nothing graphic – Hambly’s unflinching portrayal of the exploitation of Susy by her family and the way her mother keeps control is definitely abusive, which might be a trigger warning.

Emma is still looking after her sister-in-law’s little dogs and organising her life, as well as doing some last-minute script alterations. But her experience with her father in happier days when she used to accompany him on archaeological digs also is highlighted in this story, when she is asked to look through the notes of a college professor who is found dead in his office. This is an aspect of her life that we’ve heard about in the previous two books, so I was fascinated to get a glimpse of Emma’s former life before the death of her father.

This is darker than previous stories, especially when juxtaposed with the glamour and gaudiness of the Hollywood film factory at full spate. That said, I didn’t guess who’d taken Susy and the ending was very niftily handled. I’m now keen to see where this series will go next. Highly recommended for fans of historical mysteries, particularly those set in 1920s Hollywood. While I obtained an arc of Saving Susy Sweetchild from the publisher via Netgalley, the opinions I have expressed are unbiased and my own.
9/10

Emma Blackstone is back in another silent movie mystery.

Hollywood in the late 1940's was really the wild west. I enjoyed reading about the vast open spaces that made up the city and its surroundings at that time, and contrasting it with LA as it is now! Emma, her boyfriend Zal , and her screen star sister in law Kitty are reluctantly drawn into a kidnapping. A child star and her mother have gone missing, and while the movie studio awaits a ransom demand, Emma and company get on the case.

The mystery plot got a little confusing at times, but I enjoyed reconnecting with the main characters of this story (number three in its series), and look forward to more.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

Thank you Netgalley for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book. These opinions are completely my own

A mystery set during a interesting time in Hollywood, the 1920s. I'll be honest I had to reread the first chapter a few times as character and pet names were being thrown my way in every sentence.

Once I got the lay of the land I was happy I had my three chapter rule and fell in like with the story.

Barbara Hambly is so versatile. I'm a longtime fan of her Benjamin January series which involves a wildly different historical setting and set of characters than her "Silver Screen" Historical mystery series. With this third entry, I've read books two and three with pleasure. They are kind of cozies set in the silent film era. Emma, widowed and orphaned by WWI and Spanish Influenza has landed with her sister-in-aw, Kitty, a gorgeous and untalented movie star. Kitty is the mistress of an important producer/director. Emma serves as Kitty's dog carer and has gained some positive attention for rewriting "scenarios" when a script needs doctoring. She also has been called in to sort out and identify property from the office of a murdered professor whose student papers are thrown about, whose colleagues took a lot of his books and whose objects from archeological digs are missing. We already know that Emma is a scholar and her father was renowned in the period at issue.

Emma spends a great deal of time on movie sets, caring for her three charges whose doggie personalities are coming out more and more. A Western includes a famous child actor, Susy Sweetchild, daughter of the terrible stage mother Selena Sutton and an alcoholic father relegated to a guest cottage on the property. The only person looking out for Susy seems to be Susy. She is soon going to age out of cute little girl, being 7 or so, and her films are already losing attention. So when Susy, Selena and Susy's beloved cat Mr. Gray are kidnapped, there are a lot of potential parties with motives. Emma and Kitty along with others get very involved as the only people who actually care about the child. Why was the mother taken? Is the cat okay? And why is it so unclear whether anyone has demanded a ransom?

I am so enjoying this series. Hambly gives us great inside views of the film industry, its players, who gets ahead and why and also a sense of the geography, gangs, crime and peccadilloes of California of the 1920s. Who's the grownup in the room? Did you need to ]ask? It’s Susy.

I had not read the other two in the series however it standalone very well. I am however going to go back and read the other two now as I loved the story, the writing style and the characters.

It is set in 1924 Hollywood and the main character is Emma Blackstone the widowed daughter of a British professor. She has a difficult life following the death of her husband and the loss of her father. She now works as the companion to her sister in law who is a glamour silent movie star.

The 1920’s comes alive in its sleazy glory, but Hambly isn’t afraid to face its dark side and there’s plenty of dry humour included too.

Another excellent historical mystery set in 20s Hollywood: humour, solid mystery, vivid historical background
Due to health issues cannot write a proper review now. A proper one will follow
Recommended.
Many thanks to the publisher for this ARC, all opinions are mine

English widow Emma has settled comfortably into her new life in 1920s Hollywood as her silent movie star sister-in-law's companion and part-time script doctor. When a child star and her mother are kidnapped, she gets swept up in the mystery, if only because she and Kitty may be the only ones who really care if Susy gets home or not.

There has been a surprising number of mysteries centering around staged kidnapping plots going awry that I've read published in the last few years. That's all I can say while avoiding spoilers.

This is the third book in the series, but despite having not read the earlier books I was able to find my footing quickly enough in this story. 1920s Hollywood comes alive in all its sleazy glory, but for all that Hambly isn't afraid to face its dark side there's plenty of dry humor to be found here too. I loved the unlikely bond between professor's daughter Emma and the free-spirited Kitty, as well as the low-key romance between Emma and Zal.

There are one too many coincidences for my liking though, subplots twining together so neatly that it threatened my suspension of disbelief. And maybe it's because I've seen plenty of this plot recently, but I didn't find the mystery very compelling. Indeed, it drifted in and out of focus throughout the book, with the historical aspects even eclipsing it at times. Luckily, those aspects are still fascinating on their own.

Emma Blackstone, after nearly a year in Hollywood as her sister-in-law’s friend, confidant, dog handler and general factotum, as well as serving as a script doctor for Foremost Studios for almost as long, has learned the way that things work in Hollywood – no matter how often she wishes she didn’t.

Because she sees entirely too much, and is all too aware that she can’t fix ANY of it. Although she certainly does what she can, as shown in the first two books in the Silver Screen Historical Mysteries, Scandal in Babylon and One Extra Corpse.

But Susy Sweetchild’s situation still pierces her straight to the heart. Because the child is clearly – and justifiably – frightened to death. And is just as clearly aware that no one can help her or save her no matter how much they want to.

It’s 1924, and Hollywood is still the ‘Wild West’ when it comes to rules and regulations. Prohibition is in full swing, but bootlegged booze is openly everywhere. OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, won’t exist for another 45 years and child actors like Susy have no rights whatsoever – not even to the money they make.

Especially not to the money they make.

Susy is only seven years old, she’s one of Foremost Pictures biggest moneymakers, and she’s supporting her stage mother, her alcoholic father, her mother’s business manager and her mother’s succession of lovers and THEIR failed businesses as well as her father’s drinking habit. And quite possibly the partridge in the pear tree.

The only person on Susy’s side is her cat Mr. Gray, and poor Mr. Gray is even more of a hostage than she is. If Susy ‘misbehaves’ in any way, Mr. Gray is done for. And Susy is all too aware of the threat.

Possibly so is Mr. Gray. The cat seems both smart and sober, which is more than can be said for a lot of the humans in this story.

Emma would like to rescue Susy, but she has entirely too many hostages to fortune of her own to step that far out of line. She also knows it won’t do any good, as the powers that be in Los Angeles are all too aware of the side on which their bread is buttered, and that the studios are the ones doing the buttering.

But the status quo of Susy’s dreadful situation and anyone’s ability to help her out of it goes from bad to worse when the child star and her mother are kidnapped, along with Mr. Gray – a ginormous clue that should have occurred to more people an awful lot sooner.

Someone is extorting $100,000 from the studio for Susy’s safe return. (That’s something like $18,000,000 in today’s dollars!) There are multiple ransom notes being delivered, quite possibly from multiple sources. The police are not involved in the case, but the gossip columnists and the bootleggers are.

Considering how frequently the adults – including Emma and her Scooby Gang – are misdirected, as reluctant as the studio is to pay all that money to rescue a child star who is rapidly growing out of her cute and winsome phase, it looks like the princess is going to have to rescue herself in this one.

Escape Rating B: There are two stories going on in Saving Susy Sweetchild, and I have to admit that one interested me considerably more than the other.

The first is, of course, the mystery of who kidnapped Susy Sweetchild and whether the poor child can be found before it’s too late. The investigation of Susy’s abduction and ransom is the stuff of which Keystone Cops movies were made. No one covers themselves in glory in this part of the story – either because they are in on it, they intend to exploit its outcome, because they’ve been paid to look the other way or merely because they are simply incompetent but photogenic at the job they’re supposed to do.

Emma at least has a damn good excuse for not catching on right away – she’s not a professional detective, either police or private. It isn’t her job – she just cares about the kid and wants to help her.

But underneath – although often in plain sight – is the glimpse under the glitter and tinsel of Hollywood in the mid-1920s, before the Hays Code crackdown on ‘immorality’, before the talkies, and before the Great Depression.

We still read horrific stories about the treatment of child actors in Hollywood, and a lot of those stories are terrible to children and other living creatures. Susy will probably remind a lot of people of Shirley Temple, but by Temple’s time 15 years later, the situation had actually gotten a bit better. For select versions of ‘better’. Maybe less awful.

One of Susy Sweetchild’s contemporaries would have been another child actor named Jackie Coogan – who might be more familiar to readers as Uncle Fester in the 1960s Addams Family TV series. His relevance to Susy Sweetchild is that It was his lawsuit against his own mother in 1938, after he turned 21 and discovered that his mother had squandered his entire fortune, that finally put laws in place about the treatment of child actors AND the provision to put a portion of their income in trust for their adulthood.

All of the above tells readers that as much as I was following Susy’s fictional case, it was the factual underpinnings that truly had my attention for much of the story. The split in my attention wasn’t great for my absorption in Susy’s actual story, but the research dive was a lot of fun.

Howsomever, I did love the ending of Susy’s story. She was pretty much the only person who deserved a happy ending, and I was very relieved to see that she – and Mr. Gray – got exactly what they deserved – as did a whole lot of others who deserved something considerably less…happy.

Delving into the mistreatment of children in Hollywood, this story’s basis will do well especially in the this season of childhood stars coming forward with their stories on set. Though this is not generally something I am used to reading I am glad I branched out and was able to read this story!

I thank NetGalley and Severn House for an advance reader copy of “Saving Suzy Sweetchild.” All opinions and comments are my own.

If you want to read a book about how terrible the “business of Hollywood movie making” was, this is the book for you. The mystery plot is pretty much secondary to what’s behind the “finding Suzy Sweetchild” story, which turns out to be a pretty doggone dismal one. Thank goodness we still have (this being book #3) great characters in the form of Emma Blackstone, Kitty Flint AKA the film star Camille de la Rose and a host of hangers-on, and a story that Tinseltown would be happy to get behind, if it wasn’t such an indictment of the industry.

The studio needs the child star – every day she’s not filming they lose money -- so Emma puts her usual script fixer duties aside, well, most of the time, to conduct a thorough “investigation.” After a whole lot of tooing and froing (the book does do a whole lot of jumping around), with the assistance of good friend Zal and various other studio helpers, everything is brought to a satisfactory conclusion.

Emma is also able to indulge her archeological educational roots; that’s the secondary plot line that occupies a goodly portion of the story. And that’s a wrap, for “Saving Suzy Sweetchild.”

"Welcome to Hollywood of the 1920s: a world filled with glamour, fake names...and the occasional felony!

July, 1924. After nine months of living in Hollywood and working as a companion to her beautiful silent-movie star sister-in-law, young British widow Emma Blackstone is settling into her new role: doctoring film scenarios whenever the regular scenarist is overwhelmed with work, which seems to be most of the time.

Shoots for the Western movie Our Tiny Miracle are in full swing, with little seven-year-old Susy Sweetchild playing the lead and acting most professionally. Maybe too professionally, Emma thinks, shocked to the core when the child star is nearly killed in a stunt scene and her mother - former screen siren Selina Sutton - seems only to care that Susy gets the job done.

But Emma's concerns only worsen when news reaches her that Susy and her mother have been kidnapped. The ransom note says to keep the cops out of it, so it's up to Emma and Kitty to find them before the unthinkable happens and Emma is forced to rewrite Our Tiny Miracle with a far more tragic ending...

New York Times bestselling author Barbara Hambly once again brings the glamour and intrigue of Hollywood to life! An unputdownable mystery for fans of female-fronted historical mysteries set in the roaring twenties."

Personally, why not rewrite it to have a far more tragic ending?

Emma feels for young Susy, a seven year old whose stage mother cares more about money than her child, so when the child disappears along with her mother, she swings into action. A war widow, she's been living with and working for her sister in law, an actress, and this is much more exciting than tending dogs. This is a fun series but don't worry if you missed the earlier books- this will be fine as a standalone. Emma's great, the atmospherics are good, and the mystery just twisty enough to keep you guessing. Thanks to the pusblisher for the arc. A good read.

This book is too slow-paced and literary for me, but others might enjoy it,

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC.

Thanks to Severn House Publishing and NetGalley for providing me a free copy working copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. This is the third book in this series, and my second. I only missed the second book. The book stands alone well, with no real carry over from the prior books. It is set in 1924 Hollywood and the main character is Emma Blackstone the widowed daughter of a British professor of ancient civilizations. She had a difficult life after the death of her husband during World War I and the loss of her father. She now works as the companion of her sister in law, Kitty, a glamorous silent movie actress and her three pampered Pekingese dogs. She also works part time editing movie scripts. The story takes place during the filming of several silent pictures including one with Kitty starring as a wicked Arabian princess featuring sheiks, lions, camels and sandstorms, and a western starring talented young actress Suzy Sweetchild (picture Shirley Temple). But, as they say, the plot thickens when young Suzy and her mother are kidnapped and held for ransom. I really enjoyed the setting of the silent movie world, old Hollywood and Prohibition. I loved all the characters and found them varied and well drawn, although there were so many it was sometimes hard to keep track. The characters, the setting, and the plot were excellent, the only negative I can offer is that sometimes the author’s stream of consciousness style with Emma was a bit hard to follow at times as varied thoughts and emotions jumped out randomly in the midst of a conversation. That was a minor flaw more than compensated by the colorful characters, an inside look at the making of silent movies and the romance of the roaring twenties. Now I really want to pick up book two.

This book had a lot of twists and turns. I loved the main character, Emma. She is a companion to a silent film actress and she edits scripts. There were many other characters to love and hate, which is sometimes confusing. It is book three in the Silver Screen Historical Mysteries and I have not read books 1 and 2. (On my TBR list now.) I loved the backdrop of old Hollywood film sets and California. Great plot. I also loved the ending. If you love mysteries, definitely read this author.

I would like to thank NetGalley and Severn House for the ARC.

Barbara Hambly is one of my all-time favorite authors. I will follow her across genres, from science fiction to fantasy to historical fiction to murder mysteries. And what better combination than a mystery set in 1920s Hollywood, filled with glamour, Prohibition, drugs, silent film stars…and the occasional crime? I fell in love with Hambly’s take on this era with her iconic Bride of the Rat God (not kidding!) and eagerly dived into her current series of “Silver Screen Historical Mysteries.”

The protagonist is Emma Blackstone, widowed daughter of an English don (professor, in this case of Antiquities—Emma regularly quotes Ancient Greek and Latin), now earning her keep as companion and helper to her beautiful silent-movie star sister-in-law, Kitty. Among Emma’s duties are catering to Kitty’s three “celestial cream cakes,” aka Pekinese dogs, modeled after Hambly’s own pups. In her spare time, Emma edits film scenarios for Kitty’s producer, romances a cinematographer, and solves mysteries.

This third mystery in the series takes place in 1924, a time rampant with child kidnappings. Infant Blakely Coughlin (abducted in 1920), 5-year-old Giuseppi Verotta (1921), 14-year-old Robert “Bobby” Franks (killed by Leopold and Loeb in 1924), Marion Parker (1927), Grace Budd (1928), and Gill Jamieson (1929) were among those never returned to their parents. In Hambly’s mystery, the victim is Susy Sweetchild, an immensely talented child actor. From the time Emma first sees Susy, she realizes the child is in danger, from the drunken horse wrangler in the Western in which Susy stars to the mother who is only interested in Susy’s earnings, the drunken/absent father (lots of booze during Prohibition) to the grasping aunt and grandfather to the producer who simply doesn’t care so long as Susy’s films make money. So when Susy and her mother both disappear and the studio receives a ransom note ending “Do not call the cops,” it’s up to Emma, her sweetheart, and the Pekinese to unravel the mystery before it’s too late.

As with all Hambly’s work, Saving Susy Sweetchild balances page-turner tension, wonderful characters (including the dogs!), twists-upon-plot-twists, and heart-stopping moments. From start to finish, it’s a treat.