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Let's All Kill Constance is the third in Ray Bradbury's late LA noir trilogy (after Death Is a Lonely Business and A Graveyard for Lunatics), with the unnamed writer-narrator pulled into a case involving the silent-film actress Constance Rattigan, an old phone directory marked with the names of the dead, and a Los Angeles that exists somewhere between memory and dream.
Bradbury at this stage is writing in his particular elegiac late voice, which mixes affection for the actual people who haunted old Hollywood with the kind of metaphysical strangeness only he could carry off. The book is short. The prose is lyrical. The mystery is less important than the atmosphere.
Whether you can ride with the register depends on your tolerance for late-Bradbury melodrama. I find it deeply moving. Others find it overwritten.
Four stars. Recommended to Bradbury fans and to readers who like LA noir with a metaphysical seam.
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