THE NAMING GAME

‘Better Dead than Red’ isn’t the byline to Charlie Loew’s latest movie.

Charlie Loew is an alleged Communist, a script doctor, and dead.

Divided loyalties are the norm, paranoia is healthy, and everyone has dirt on someone else in Tinseltown by day, and Babylon by night.

J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the CIA aka the Company race to decipher the cryptic piece of paper found in the dead man’s pocket. Walker is sent undercover as a screenwriter into a major studio. His ‘colleague’ Leslie becomes the secretary to Dr. Phillip Ernest, the shrink to the stars, who might be doing more than mending fragile psyches. Chief Parker of the LAPD doesn’t like strangers in town, and the ruthless Roy Cohn will cut a deal with anyone who will play the naming game.

. . .

“Brilliantly written, Gabriel Valjan’s The Naming Game whisks the reader back in time to postwar Los Angeles. Spies, Communism, and Hollywood converge in a first-rate thriller.”

~ Bruce Robert Coffin, Agatha Award-nominated author

of Beyond the Truth, A Detective Byron Mystery

“With crackling dialogue and a page turning plot shot-through with authentic period detail, Gabriel Valjan pulls the reader into the hidden world of the 1950’s Hollywood studio scene, involving murder, McCarthyism and mayhem.”

~ James L’Etoile, author of At What Cost and Bury the Past

“Terrific historical noir as Gabriel Valjan takes us on a trip through postwar Hollywood involving scandal, McCarthyism, blacklisting, J. Edgar Hoover and, of course, murder. Compelling story, compelling characters.”

~ R.G. Belsky, author of the Clare Carlson Mystery Series