Retired actress Diana Poole, the star of Melodie Johnson Howe's City of Mirrors, goes back to work after her screenwriter husband dies, leaving her with a rundown Malibu house and not much money. On her first movie back, Diana discovers her troubled, young costar's dead body. Then another corpse shows up at an old house where Diana used to live as a child with her movie-star mother, Nora. Diana gets drawn into the mystery surrounding these deaths and sets out to solve them, finding she has to not only act like a tough broad but be one if she wants to come out of the experience alive.
Howe was a TV and film actress in the mid-1960s through the late '70s, so the details about Diana's life on set and around Los Angeles ring true. The film industry people are full of insecurities and vapidity and ego, but Diana is sympathetic as a woman over 40 who has to jumpstart her life and career in a make-believe world even harsher than the real one. She wants happiness more than an Oscar, but it's hard to escape her mother's shadow and the lingering sense of loneliness after her husband's death.
Howe has a bit of trouble with dialogue, with characters sometimes speaking melodramatically, sounding like narrative, saying exactly what they mean. Diana quotes Oscar Wilde's observation that when people talk about the weather, they mean something else. One wishes some of the characters would "talk about the weather" more. But the story moves fast enough, and Diana is a clear-eyed narrator to guide readers through the land of illusions. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, writer/editor blogging at Pop Culture Nerd