Friday, July 15, 2011

The Flagellator by Carter Brown

She was Hollywood's hottest sex goddess, until a killer cast her as the world's most glamorous corpse.

Robert McGinnis Cover

One nice thing about being a sadist is that you can give more often than receive. Trouble is, your recipients are not always grateful. For Theo Altman, film director and torture master, the number of dissatisfied customers was legion. Prime, among them, a curvacious, copper-haired secretary whose private secrets were as well kept as she was, a screen goddess whose sudden flight from sanity was as mysterious as her fall from the cliff, and a very photogenic corpse.

Horwitz Edition
Rick Holman's job was to sift out the crimes from the punishments and tie up the whole package for a well heeled producer. But when someone rewrote the scenario, adding blackmail, double-cross, and a Hollywood ending that could very well be Rick's own. She was a nymphet from the Oklahoma backwoods who had bed-hopped her way into stardom, Fluer Falaise, the Hollywood wonder chick who did not believe the sky was the limit, until the day it started falling. Fluer's decline started on her honeymoon, with her husband's drowning, continued through her second marriage, which put her in a sanitarium. It forced her into low grade pictures and even lower grade love affairs. It ultimately drover her right over the edge of the cliff. Her life so perfectly followed a movieland scenario that Holman could not understand why anyone would question her suicide attempt. But someone did, then someone else, and pretty soon the plot began to thicken as the script of Fluer's life.

Signet Reprint
Printing History

Horwitz Publications
Numbered Series #145 1969
Printed in Hong Kong

New American Library
Signet Books
D3776 February 1969
Y7403 1977

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