Heart of Stone

April 11, 2016
Set in the Adirondacks in August of 1961, Ziskin’s solid fourth Ellie Stone mystery (after 2015’s Stone Cold Dead) begins with slovenly local police chief Ralph Terwilliger asking the vacationing 25-year-old reporter to photograph the corpses of two people who fell from a cliff in a nearby cove. Though the deceased—one a teenager from an area music camp, the other a wealthy man in his mid-30s—don’t appear to have known one another, their deaths are deemed accidental. Sensing that there’s more to the story, Ellie launches her own investigation. Clever clues and convincing red herrings share the page with discussions of faith, prejudice, and cold war politics. Larger-than-life characters entertain but fail to ring true. Terwilliger’s oafishness strains credulity. And Ellie reads more like a man’s idea of a strong woman than a flesh-and-blood one; whiskey-soaked, frequently naked, and lusted after by every man she meets, she’s outspoken until it comes to defending her intellect and accomplishments. Agent: William Reiss, John Hawkins & Associates.

April 1, 2016
Upstate reporter Ellie Stone's perfect 1961 Adirondack vacation is spoiled by everything from a skinny-dipping aunt to a pair of deaths that may or may not be accidental. Even swimmers who are comfortable with their bodies don't want strange men showing up when they've been bathing in the nude. But Ellie's Aunt Lena is even more disturbed when Ralph "Tiny" Terwilliger, the new chief of the Prospector Lake police, demands that Ellie (No Stone Unturned, 2014, etc.) and her Leica accompany him to the spot beneath Baxter's Rock where two men plunged to their deaths so that she can take the crime-scene photos he's not equipped to take. Not that Tiny, whose body odor is as offensive as his anti-Semitic language, thinks there's been any crime; he's not troubled by the fact that both men, identified as music camp teen Jerry Kaufman and Hollywood producer Charles M. Morton, both dived from the rock and missed Prospector Lake. Ellie, who's swiftly drawn back to the musical friendship circle of her late brother, Elijah, reconvened at nearby Arcadia Lodge, is far more suspicious. She's on hand when Ruth Hirsch, scoping out one of her photos, identifies Morton as Karl Marx Merkleson, another childhood friend who split with the Arcadia contingent, especially militantly religious Simon Abramowitz, when he abjured his religion and married shiksa Gayle Pierce. Can Ellie, who's fallen hard for math teacher Isaac Eisenstadt, trust her judgment about the members of the Arcadia crowd, who turn out to be even more tightknit than she knows? Ziskin plants clues so conscientiously that most readers will beat the heroine to the killer. What makes this case stand apart is its sensitively nuanced evocation of the conflicts that swirl around the artsy Jewish milieu of the early 1960s.

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May 1, 2016
It's August of 1961, and two dead bodies have been found on the beach in a resort area in upstate New York. Did they fall from that looming 70-foot cliff? Were they pushed? Reporter and amateur detective Ellie Stone happens to be visiting. She can't help but poke about, and readers had better get used to spending time with this salty woman. She consumes copious amounts of Dewar's, invites whomever she likes into her bed, and torments herself over her fondness for cigarettes. Sheand weget to know just about everybody in the resort and listen to yards of their conversation, much of which is about musicespecially operaliterature, and Leftist politics. Ellie comes to suspect the deaths grew out of the complex weave of this self-absorbed, well-to-do society. But the solution, accompanied by tension and violence, still leaves the reader wondering if detection or blind luck brought it about. Still, the period setting is vividly rendered, and Ellie is a memorable character, even if we wonder whether there was really any point to her snooping? Besides her encounter with that handsome teacher, of course.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)