Book of the Day

From the review

Aaron Touissant knows how to make a scandal disappear before the morning trades even smell it. That's his whole job at Skyline Studios: keep the stars' secrets buried, keep the checks cashed, keep his own face pleasant and unreadable while he does it. Rasheed Newson opens his novel on that talent and then spends the rest of the book asking what it costs a man to be that good at hiding people, including himself. The hook is Xavier Barlow, the young Black actor Skyline built up to be its answer to Sidney Poitier, and whose death Aaron can no longer file away as an unfortunate accident. But the pleasure of this book isn't really the whodunit, even though Newson paces the investigation with a competent hand and doles out studio-lot menace at a satisfying clip. The pleasure is watching Aaron narrate his own history alongside it: the military service that taught him how to disappear inside an assignment, the years of ushering closeted actors into marriages of convenience and out of vice-squad trouble, the particular loneliness of being the one person at every party who is working. Newson writes him with real interiority, a man who has gotten so fluent in other people's cover stories that he's half forgotten how to tell his own.