Starred review from March 1, 1999
Beck rightly dedicates this zany parody of 1920s exotic adventure fiction to Sax Rohmer, E. Phillip Oppenheim, the Baroness Orczy and their ilk, who created the genre. Movie superstar Nadia Wentworth reads The Wrath of Kali-Ra, written decades ago by the long-forgotten Valerian Ricardo, and determines to produce a film about the eponymous cruel dominatrix, Queen of Doom. Immediately, Nadia is besieged by a horde of greedy claimants to the Kali-Ra copyright and by others scrambling for a financial piece of the movie: Ricardo's possessive widow; his naive great-grandnephew; a scheming, possibly illegitimate granddaughter; an inquisitive academic authority on Ricardo; a luckless British screenwriter; a feckless lawyer representing a crook hiding in the Caribbean; an inept security adviser; a washed-up crooner with Mafia connections; and a mysterious "slave" of Kali-Ra. Melanie Oakley, Nadia's assistant, must sort through this dazzling hodgepodge and protect Nadia's project. Mistaken identity, accidents, fights, a stabbing and an abduction proceed apace, studded with hilarious excerpts from Ricardo's melodramatic novels. After a grand finale in which the copyright ownership is cleared and nearly all the characters pair off, readers will still be chuckling at this dead-on sendup of Hollywood and pulp fiction.
March 1, 1999
Nadia Wentworth, a big-bosomed, empty-headed Hollywood actress, chances upon a fictional character she wishes to portray. Taken from pulp novels by a jaded 1920s drug addict, Kali-Ra (the Queen of Doom) embodies a dangerous blend of eroticism, bondage, and violence. As soon as Nadia makes her plans known, grasping strangers appear on her doorstep: the author's ancient widow, an alcohol-soaked scriptwriter, and (could it be!) Kali-Ra's current incarnation. Beck's (We Interrupt This Broadcast, LJ 11/1/97) subsequent mixture of spoof, exaggerated confrontation, phoney mysticism, and murder spotlights Nadia's level-headed assistant Melanie, who saves the day. For larger collections.
January 1, 1999
As the irresistibly tacky title suggests, this is a fun send-up of Hollywood types. By chance, spoiled actress Nadia Wentworth reads a story by obscure 1920s author Valerian Ricardo. After falling in love with the main character, Kali-Ra, Queen of Doom, she decides to resurrect the character in a movie starring (naturally) herself. It appears that no one owns the rights to the old Ricardo novels, but soon a variety of supposed relatives and strange Ricardo-ites begins crawling out of the woodwork. All eventually congregate at Nadia's mansion, where mysterious threats against the actress ensue. Although the mystery of who is making the threats is unremarkable, Beck has great fun with the odd cast of characters. Best of all, perhaps, is the use she makes of the novel-within-a-novel gambit, interspersing sections of Ricardo's pulpy books with the main action. As cheesy and addictive as snack chips, the Kali-Ra stories will have many readers wishing they could pick up an old Ricardo novel at the library. ((Reviewed January 1 & 15, 1999))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1999, American Library Association.)