THE CUTTING ROOM

Librettist Klavan’s first novel under his own name (previously: Margaret Tracy, Mrs. White, 1983) stars a trivia buff in a madcap search for the Holy Grail of missing movies.

Because Alan Gilbert, the self-anointed guru of the public-access show My Movies, can’t resist inviting Ray Milano, the rival author of the Trivial Man newsletter, to his place to see his earth-shaking latest acquisition, Ray’s on hand to discover his corpse, phone the police, and, in the first of many bonehead decisions, not mention that Alan’s missing find was a complete 148-minute print of The Magnificent Ambersons, snatched from the absent Orson Welles in 1942, slashed by an hour, and released at the bottom end of a double bill. It seems obvious that the cops have the wrong suspect in crack-addled Lorelei Reed, but nothing else is obvious, especially after Gus Ziegler, the buff cinematographer who’s evidently swiped the priceless print from his partner, turns up equally dead, and both Ben Williams, the action star of the Cause Pain franchise, and his wife, untalented Hollywood star Rosie Bryant, offer to hire inexperienced Ray to run errands that’ll take him from LA to Barcelona, where he’ll read of Welles’s Brazilian romance with one suspect’s grandmother, to Boston, where he’ll have to deal with the kidnapping of young Orson Kripp, before extracting a confession that brings the curtain thudding down.

The hectic, overstuffed caper is larded with nuggets of irrelevant movie trivia readers may well find fascinating—or grating.