A friend of Valentino’s, washed up action film star Craig Hunter, is found beaten to death in a known mobster’s bar. The last person he phoned was Valentino. Val goes to comfort Hunter’s grieving ex-wife and finds a case full of books about Universal monster movies. The amateur detective and film preservationist discovers that Hunter was trying to broker a deal for a long lost screen test for Frankenstein. Universal had wanted the iconic monster to be played by there then reigning horror film star Bela Lugosi. The screen test was so awful that the studio ordered it burned. Was the film saved from destruction and if so is it valuable enough that someone would kill for it?

This is the third book in the Valentino series. I like reading this series because of the film history. Estleman did a lot of research for this novel and included a bibliography of resources at the end.

One of the characters in this installment is a young man who is part of the steampunk movement. The author writes about the clothes, music, and basic esthetics of steampunk. It fits in well with the Frankenstein theme of the book.

Like all of the books in this series, it is an enjoyable read that I recommend to anyone interested in classic movies and likes a good mystery. ( )

Interesting story, but clumsy writing. ( )

Alive! is the third novel in Loren D. Estleman's series about Valentino, a Los Angeles archivist whose job it is to track down lost pieces of cinema history, preferably to secure said miscellany for his University film studies department. It has long been rumoured that a screen test remained extant of Bela Lugosi in the role of Frankenstein's Monster, a test that was so very dreadful that he preferred it to be reported that he turned down the role which subsequently made Boris Karloff a household name. Valentino isn't thinking about that particular rumour, however; he's got his hands full with the continuing, and hugely expensive, restoration of a Golden Age theatre, not to mention his jealousy concerning his girlfriend Harriet, who is off at a seminar doing who knows what. And then there's his old friend Craig Hunter, a one-time actor fallen into addiction and desperation; Valentino brushes him off when Hunter calls in the wee hours, only to regret it later when Hunter turns up dead. Now it's up to Valentino to follow the trail and find out what happened before something similar befalls him.... I love the idea of a film hunter, it's such a quixotic job to hold, and Estleman is very knowledgeable about film history, which is shown by his extensive bibliographies with which he ends each book in this series. I also like that he includes a character here named J. Anderson Greenwood, a wealthy former publisher of horror magazines; the man is clearly modeled on J. Forrest Ackerman, but only somebody familiar with the horror genre as a whole and film in particular would know that. The characters are all well-drawn and the mystery fairly clued; best of all, one needn't have read Estleman's earlier novels in the series, or his short stories featuring Valentino, to enjoy this book. Recommended. ( )