The Last Picture Before War

Hollywood, 1937. Tom Ryder is a British actor of modest distinction. He has delivered forty-three lines across six productions since January. He is keeping count. He has not yet decided why.

What Ryder is, under his screen credit and his studio friendships and his place at the right tables, is an officer of British Intelligence.

He moves easily through the world of the lots and the canyon houses and the private dining rooms where the real business of the picture industry gets done. He knows the right people. He is careful about being known by them. In a city built on performance, he is very good at his work.

When a piece of footage surfaces inside a Paramount picture, footage that should not exist, connecting the glamour of the Hollywood hills to the gathering shadow of the Third Reich, Ryder is given a simple instruction. What follows is not simple. The man who wants the footage gone has reached into every room Ryder has spent fourteen months learning to enter. The woman who brought it to light is running out of time. And the life Ryder has built in California, careful and sufficient and almost believable, is coming apart at the seams he thought he'd hidden.