James W. Ziskin (Heart of Stone) produces a memorable romp through 1960s Hollywood in his smart and fun thriller Cast the First Stone.
The Ellie Stone Mystery series follows a young, clever--if somewhat naive--reporter for an upstate New York newspaper. In this installment, Ellie is whisked off to Los Angeles to track down and profile Toby Eberle, a local boy on the brink of stardom. But when Eberle goes missing, and the producer of the film he was starring in is found murdered, Stone must piece together the truth or lose her big story.
Cast the First Stone starts off a little slowly, bogged down by Stone's excessive internal monologue--usually in the form of rhetorical questions used to frame the plot--but soon finds its stride. Ziskin crafts a female lead who is intelligent, resourceful and energetic, and genuinely funny. Her reaction to Hollywood superficiality is both wry and self-deprecatory, especially when people keep telling her, unprompted, that she's pretty but not "Hollywood pretty." Ziskin succeeds at sustaining the historical reality of the early 1960s, not only in the material fashions of the times, but in disturbing reminders of the era's backward mores. For example, as Stone investigates the murder, she discovers a coordinated attempt on behalf of the studios to cover up the homosexual activities of big-name macho actors. Society's intolerance of gays becomes a major theme in the narrative as Stone questions her own attitudes and biases. This adds a serious aspect of social justice to the more standard plot twists and mystery tropes. --Scott Neuffer, freelance journalist, poet and fiction author