Epitaph for a Dream

The eve of World War II. A Hollywood producer’s murdered wife. Her husband’s guilty memory of a shipboard romance. A stolen painting signed “Picasso.” French gangsters. A beautiful courtesan. A shoot-out in a brasserie. All these and more confront Private Detective Riley Fitzhugh as he travels from Hollywood to the Riviera, Paris, and London in search of his client’s vanished dream girl and some answers. Is the painting a genuine Picasso or just a clever forgery? Who is responsible for the corpses that keep littering his path and complicating the investigation? And whatever happened to Amanda Billingsgate?

Terry Mort is a graduate of Princeton University and the University of Michigan, where he received an MA in English and began work on a PhD. After grad school he served as an officer in the US Navy. He was deployed to Southeast Asia, where he saw a variety of action. Mort has written a number of nonfiction histories, widely praised in the national press. He has also written several novels.