I'm really liking this Burning Cove series, at least I hope it will be a series and not just two books. Set in the 30s in a small California town called Burning Cove, close enough to LA that its more upscale hotels and clubs attract the Hollywood heavy hitters. Both books have started with the story of a young woman who has to flee for her life and create herself anew to survive. This was the Golden Age of cinema, with the escapism of watching beautiful and wealthy people living exciting and romantic lives being an antidote to the grimness of real, Depression era life for the average American.
The Other Lady Vanishes (and you don't find out the meaning/significance of the title until very nearly the end of the book...and it's a good one) begins with a young woman whose husband had her committed to an insane asylum where she was forced to be a test subject for a halucinogenic drug being developed there, while her husband looted her considerable inheritance to save his own family's business. All very melodramatic and convoluted and so perfectly right that it would have been a smash as a film in that era.
I've been reading Jayne Ann Krentz, in all her guises, for many years. In fact, she was one of only two fairly atypical "romance" authors that I serendipitously discovered while shopping for romance books to send to a friend in England. The other was Jennifer Crusie. I loved both their books on first reading and was soon buying everything by either of them I could find. Fortunately, JAK has been prolific and reliable for all these years. If you're not sure about this new series, give it a try, keeping in mine the era and what made a good story then, and now. I'd love to see either of these books (The Girl Who Knew Too Much was the other) made into films. They each have several strong female characters and men who will love them and protect them, if ever they should need protection. They're pretty successful of surviving even very dangerous situations through quick thinking and the courage to keep going. Really, really great reads/listens. And, incidentally, this reader, Nina Alvamar, is very much better than the one for the first book.