An unscripted murder

Terminally hip tabloid journalist Jimmy Gage returns for an encore performance in Robert Ferrigno's fast-paced Scavenger Hunt. Introduced in the 2001 novel Flinch, Gage was faced with the dreadful prospect that his successful surgeon brother might well be a serial killer. In his latest outing, Gage investigates the death of Garrett Walsh, a renegade Hollywood director, a one-time boy wonder fallen on hard times. It seems that Walsh had written a new script, by his own admission "the most dangerous screenplay in Hollywood," a cinema tell-all that unabashedly named names. Now he lay dead in a koi pond, perhaps an accident, but that just doesn't quite ring true for Jimmy Gage. For one thing, the script has disappeared, and as the novel's title suggests, Gage sets out on a Los Angeles-wide search for it; but, as in any good scavenger hunt, there are competitors, and Gage's opponents are deadly. Like Ferrigno's previous works, Scavenger Hunt is populated with a seedy assortment of lowlifes and high flyers; the plotting is intricate, bordering on convoluted, and the tone darkly comical.

Nashville-based writer Bruce Tierney is a lifelong mystery reader who was weaned on the Hardy Boys.