The Remake: As Time Goes by - Hardcover

Private eye R.J. Brooks's movie-star parents are dead, but they still make his life hell, even when his resemblance to his father isn't blowing each surveillance. The latest complication: a threatened remake of their most famous film, As Time Goes By, by cheesy Andromeda Pictures--a project bound to tarnish Brooks's fondest childhood memories and ruin his current love life (since his sweetie Casey Wingate has signed on as its associate producer). Brooks isn't the only one who's unhappy about the project--somebody's sending threatening rhymes to ruthless Andromeda CEO Janine Wright, and spiking her lawyer's prosciutto with poison--and the NYPD thinks the somebody is Brooks. So partly to clear his name, partly to look after Casey, he hops a plane to L.A., just in time to find out that (1) Janine has just received a new note with an L.A. postmark; (2) the screenwriter has been killed; and (3) Janine's ex-husband William Kelley, the ex-con Brooks had located for her hostile daughter Mary Kelley, has jumped parole and run straight into a fatal accident. What else can go wrong? How about if the other suspect a too-anxious Brooks tries to feed an LAPD captain turns out, upon further investigation, to be quadriplegic? The murder victims (more will follow) are almost comically forgettable. But Bogart has pruned back the lushly pulpish prose of Play It Again (1995) to produce a workmanlike, though never exactly surprising, sample of the imperiled-movie genre. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

When the slimiest producer in Hollywood sets out to make a sleazy sequel to perhaps the most beloved film ever made, there are naturally bound to be those who resent it. One of these is R. J. Brooks, son of the stars who were catapulted to the heights of Hollywood by the original film, and another is whoever is threatening death to the cast and crew of the sequel (including the woman who may, if the relationship ever gels, be R. J.'s sweetheart). R. J.'s problem is that the police in both Los Angeles and his home turf, New York, believe him to be the culprit. Fortunately, as a gumshoe in the grand noir tradition, he is well able to discover the truth. Bogart is equally well able, thanks to both heritage (yes, he's you-know-who's son) and natural storytelling ability, to delineate the tawdry convergence of show business, greed, and passion in a taut, action-filled thriller full of well-drawn innocents, devils, patsies, and toughs. Dennis Winters