Summer, 1936: Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell's first novel, takes the world by storm. Everyone in Hollywood knows Civil War pictures don't make a dime, but renegade producer David O. Selznick snaps up the movie rights and suddenly America has just one question: Who will play Scarlett O'Hara?

When Gwendolyn Brick gets her hands on the book, the clouds part and the angels sing the Hallelujah Chorus. Only a real Southern belle can play Scarlett - and didn't her mama raise her on stories of Sherman's march and those damned Yankees? She's going to have to stand out bigger than a hoop skirt at a Twelve Oaks barbeque to win that role.

Marcus Adler is the golden boy of Cosmopolitan Pictures, the studio William Randolph Hearst started for his mistress, Marion Davies. When Marcus' screenplay becomes Davies' first hit, he's invited to Hearst Castle for the weekend. The kid who was kicked out of Pennsylvania gets to rub shoulders with Myrna Loy, Winston Churchill, and Katharine Hepburn - but when the trip turns fiasco, he starts sinking fast. He needs a new story, real big and real soon.

When Selznick asks George Cukor to direct Gone with the Wind, it's the scoop of the year for Kathryn Massey, the Hollywood Reporter's newest columnist. But dare she publish it?

The Trouble with Scarlett is the second in Martin Turnbull's series of historical novels set during Hollywood's golden age.