Czech Holocaust memoirist, literary translator and political exile Heda Margolius Kovly turned her pen to fiction. Inspired by Chandler, Kovaly knit her own terrifying experiences in early 1950s Socialist Prague: her husband's imprisonment and wrongful execution and her own persecution at his disgrace, into a smart and evocative psychological thriller-cum-detective novel. Set in and around a cinema where a murder was recently committed, follows the unfolding of the investigation while telling the stories of the women who work there as ushers, each of whom is forced to support herself.