FINGERPRINTS AND FACELIFTS
by Rick Copp
Three aging but beautiful ex-detectives reunite when a menace from their past threatens their children.
The night before his wedding, a lap dancer lures Zak Corley into a hotel room where two men beat him senseless. Someone takes a potshot at Bowie Lassiter as he tracks a philandering husband on a lake in Xochimilco. Two thugs try to hustle Bianca Cardoza into a van outside the Bofetada Café in Rio. It’s only when Bowie’s mother, Dani Mendez, and Bianca’s stepmom, Tess Monahan, show up for Zak’s cancelled wedding that it dawns on Claire Walker-Corley that someone is targeting the progeny of the L.A. Dolls, three “kick-ass private eye[s]” who tangled with the worst of the worst back in the ’80s. Now pushing 50, each ex-Doll is enjoying a tamer life. Dani is Assistant Chief of Police in San Francisco. Tess, widow of a mega-millionaire shipping magnate, travels the world on her yacht with her young lover Paulo. And Claire, happily married to Jeb Walker, teaches self-defense classes at the Sherman Oaks Women’s Center. So it’s just to protect their kids from someone’s warped revenge fantasy that the Dolls have to work together once more—right? Or could this be a new beginning for the Dolls, as protective Jeb fears?
Copp (The Actor’s Guide to Greed, 2005, etc.) provides too much backstory and too many suspects for the Dolls’ debut to slide down as easily as it might.