THE DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND

The Devil's Playground US book cover

THE DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND
US Edition

The Devil's Playground UK book cover

THE DEVIL’S PLAYGROUND
UK Edition

Addictive… the most sheerly entertaining novel I’ve raced through in at least a year… fresh, forceful, elegant but wild

A.J. Finn

Craig Russell walks a razor’s edge between gothic suspense and horror… a masterful thriller

Lincoln Child

Superb! The Devil’s Playground is imagination on steroids… breathtaking!

Jeffery Deaver

A dark, riveting thriller set in 1920s Hollywood about “the greatest horror movie ever made”, the curse said to surround it, and a deadly search, decades later, for the single copy rumored still to exist.

1927: Hollywood studio fixer Mary Rourke is called to the palatial home of “the most desirable woman in the world”, silent movie actress Norma Carlton, star of The Devil’s Playground. When Rourke finds Carlton dead, she wonders if the dark rumors she’s heard are true: that The Devil’s Playground really is a cursed production. But nothing in Hollywood is ever what it seems, and cynical fixer Rourke, more used to covering up the truth for studio bosses, finds herself seeking it out.

1967: Paul Conway, film historian and fervid silent movie aficionado, is on the trail of a tantalizing rumour: that a single copy of The Devil’s Playground—a Holy Grail for film buffs that was supposedly cursed and lost to time—may still exist. His search takes him deep into the Mojave Desert, to an isolated hotel that hasn’t changed in forty years but harbours only one occupant—and a shocking secret.

Separated by decades, both Rourke and Conway begin to suspect that the real Devil’s Playground is in fact Hollywood itself.