Silvia Moreno-Garcia, whose bestselling novels include MEXICAN GOTHIC and VELVET WAS THE NIGHT, returns with THE SEVENTH VEIL OF SALOME, a kaleidoscopic, gritty historical epic.

Hollywood in the 1950s is a time of upheaval: the studio system has begun to falter, and a whole new generation of actors is invading the scene. Young adults, no longer swayed by Clark Gable, long for players like Marlon Brando, donned in his signature fitted T-shirt. With the demand to always be new, new, new, director Max Niemann is feeling the pressure. His latest work, The Seventh Veil of Salome, has been in production for three years, a long time for a B-list production company needing to wow its audiences. Numerous script rewrites, compromises with censors and scores of hungry actors have gotten him this far.

But now Max needs his star: the eponymous Salome, a biblical princess whose forbidden dance results in the beheading of John the Baptist. The Salome Max envisions must be a chimera --- part lion, part dove --- a woman whose duality makes her monstrous and powerful. Needless to say, countless young actresses, particularly those who have suffered in bit roles for years, are desperate for the part. But when Max’s assistant, Isadora Christine, discovers a dentist’s daughter working as a receptionist in Mexico City, she knows she has found their star.

"Moreno-Garcia pens a gritty, richly layered masterpiece that is as sensuous and compelling as Salome’s seven-veiled dance.... From an author who has yet to find a genre she cannot master, THE SEVENTH VEIL OF SALOME is a surefire hit that will leave you gasping in your seat long after the credits roll."

Francisca Severa “Vera” Larios Gavaldón has performed in a few school plays, but her demanding mother has always made it clear that her sister --- the more fair-skinned, charming of the two --- is the only Larios destined for stardom. However, her sentiments do not prevent Vera from being cast in the titular role, and before Vera can blink, she and her mother are ensconced in her aunt’s home in California. Her Mexican relatives had to lie and say they were “Spanish” to even be allowed to live there. Racism is alive and well in Hollywood, and Vera is stunned to see that even her fellow brown-skinned actors and actresses seem willing to capitulate to it. They take on roles as Indian snake charmers and Japanese geishas, and are happy to dress in “exotic” fruit- and bangle-adorned outfits that emphasize their otherness.

Still, Vera is excited about the role and eager to perform, even if it means performing in her personal life as well. After all, the Hollywood studios of the ’50s were not just businesses but handlers, as capable of manufacturing stars and starlets as they were of burying stories of homosexual love, benders and abortions. Fortunately, for Max and the rest of the Salome cast, Vera is a good girl. So good, in fact, that she goes along with the studio’s PR stunt of a relationship with her costar, the brash and brazen Clifford Collins.

Nancy Hartley, on the other hand, is decidedly not “good.” The child of a performer, Nancy was dragged to every dance, singing and acting class you could imagine, all before she was five. In the four years she has been in Hollywood as an adult, she has secured a few bit roles, a few less modeling gigs, and even a dirty photo job. But four years is a lifetime in Hollywood…especially for women, and doubly so for women forced to down cocktails to network, eat diet pills to combat the drinks, and occasionally sleep with the wrong man for a chance at a hot meal or rent check.

Nancy has been stringing along two men as part of her “networking”: Pierce Pratt, a casting agent, and Benny Aldean, a low-grade dope dealer whose, ahem, dealings with Hollywood make him a worthwhile suitor, at least part-time. Like every other hungry young actress, Nancy has heard about Max’s inability to cast Salome, but she feels certain that her relationship with Pierce will secure her the role.

So you can imagine Nancy’s outrage when she is not only passed over for the part, but is rejected in favor of a “Spic,” a “beaner.” Nancy secures a supporting role in the film, but rather than delight in her good fortune, she obsesses over Vera: her innocent nature (surely an act), her heaving breasts (typical Mexican seductress), and her approach to the role, which better encompasses Max’s vision of a virgin-whore, whereas Nancy would have played the part with all sex, no substance.

As the production continues, Vera, spurred by Salome, finds her voice, hones her skill and even attracts the (very much wanted) attention of Jay Rutland, a generationally wealthy jazz pianist. Nancy, meanwhile, succumbs to her greed, her feelings of failure and her jealousy. And Salome? Well, you’ll have to read the book to learn her fate. For now, let’s just say that all three women must learn the wickedness of men in order to survive their stories.

Alternating between glamorous Hollywood, where the competition between Vera and Nancy unfolds with disastrous ends, and Salome’s palace in the Herodian dynasty of the Roman Empire, Moreno-Garcia pens a gritty, richly layered masterpiece that is as sensuous and compelling as Salome’s seven-veiled dance. She is a skilled researcher as much as she is a gifted writer, and her sordid, seedy depiction of Hollywood is instantly immersive. Even with our modern awareness of the Hollywood star- and starlet-producing machine, her dramatic reveal of just how insidious these dealings really were is dizzying.

But the novel truly shines in Salome’s chapters, where longtime fans of Moreno-Garcia will see her trademark magic at its most spellbinding. The competition between Vera and Nancy is one thing, but the mirroring of Vera’s growth in the film’s script is entirely another, an element that really elevates the book into something gorgeously balanced and wholly realized. Moreno-Garcia gives us two women, each barreling toward their demise, targeted not by their own desires, wants or lusts, but by those of men. To win their freedoms and their futures, each woman will have to weaponize her own innocence while appraising the real-life chess board like the most cunning of strategists. To be a woman, Moreno-Garcia proves, is to be at war.

From an author who has yet to find a genre she cannot master, THE SEVENTH VEIL OF SALOME is a surefire hit that will leave you gasping in your seat long after the credits roll.