Hidden Hills is a private celebrity enclave of white picket fences and horse trails that seems to exist in a dream world. But when reality TV show superstar Kitty Winslow is killed within their gates and corpses are found in the vast state park outside them, LASD detective Eve Ronin realises there is a deadly, razor-thin line between what’s real and what’s imagined.
Eve discovers that Kitty’s surreal on- and off-camera life, a blur of fact and fantasy, shockingly mirrors her own as she struggles to investigate the killings, wade into a music industry war, and battle a vicious Chilean gang—all while her life is being turned into a fictional cop show directed by her estranged father.
Eve’s grip on reality and the case is strained to the breaking point as the slayings continue, the media frenzy reaches a fever pitch, and the only inescapable truth she can see is death…and it’s coming for her.

I had a lot of fun with the first four novels in this series, Eve Ronin is an engaging character and the crimes she gets involved with are exotic in a very Los Angeles way so I pre-ordered ‘Dream Town‘,

It didn’t disappoint. I got an inside view of Reality TV, the low down on how Chilean burglary gangs work. and a mystery set in an equestrian (quarter horses and stock saddles, not hunters and English saddles) gated community for the rich and famous.

I enjoyed catching up with Eve Ronin. I particularly liked that she was starting to change, partly to get a life outside her job and partly to accommodate the injuries she’s picked up along the way. In this book, the TV series based on her previous exploits is underway and watching it being made is messing with Eve’s sense of reality. Which was an elegant segue into a murder plot that involves a Kardashian-like Reality TV show where the patriarch spent so many years playing a Sheriff on TV that he thinks of himself as a lawman.

The first quarter of the book had a lot of recap in it but once Eve picked up a homicide case with some legs to it, she and the book became a lot more focused, the book hit its stride and I was having fun.

I love the gentle humour that permeates these books. A lot of it comes from how seriously Eve takes herself and her job and her inability to anticipate which of her behaviours other people will think are odd. What Eve did to the Doberman that was attacking a suspect that she’d been chasing shouldn’t have made me laugh but it did. I could imagine that dog’s indignant face as it tried to work out how it had ended up in the pool. Then there are Eve’s parents. Her narcissistic absent-for-most-of-her-life-but-now-directing-her-TV-series father is a slimeball. Her mother is a nightmare but a very believable nightmare.

The mystery worked well. The characters were writ large. The pace was fast without feeling rushed. It was exactly the kind of polished entertainment that I’d been hoping for.