Lone Star

January 26, 2009
Ifkovic’s promising debut, the first in a series, features real-life writer Edna Ferber as an amateur sleuth in 1955 Hollywood. The Pulitzer Prize winner is visiting there because her bestselling novel, Giant
, is being made into a film starring Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson and James Dean. While she’s repelled at how show biz distorts the thinking of everyone involved in it, she becomes fascinated by young Dean—truculent, winsome, infuriating and brilliant. Though he’s the hottest actor in town, he’s still vulnerable to blackmail letters from an unstable actress, so he’s the prime suspect when she’s murdered. The septuagenarian Ferber, an equally shrewd but tarter version of Miss Marple, begins investigating with the help of Giant
co-star Mercedes McCambridge, sorting through a city built on vanity and glamour. Ifkovic handles the mystery plot competently, but the main pleasure is looking beneath the surface of the movie business to see the stars as people, in particular the doomed Dean.

November 15, 2008
Bestselling novelist Edna Ferber, in Hollywood as co-producer of the 1955 screen adaptation of Giant, adds sleuthing to her extensive rsum when James Dean is accused of murder.

Nobody knows better than the author of Show Boat, Cimarron, So Big and Dinner at Eight that everyone has a skeleton in his closet. But James Dean 's closet seems to be solid skeletons, with more arriving every day. The volcanic actor doesn 't bathe, change his clothes, show up on time for appointments or pick up after himself. Craving love and validation from everyone, even the 70-year-old novelist, he 's equally demanding and undiscriminating in his sex life, and it 's no surprise that Carisa Krausse, whom he dated briefly during a location shoot in Marfa, Texas, has threatened to go to the tabloids with the story that she 's carrying Jimmy 's love child. Jack Warner, who sees Jimmy as his studio 's future, has assigned troubleshooter Jake Geyser to Giant, but there 's nothing Warner Bros. can do to keep someone from killing Carisa. Her death doesn 't end either the rumors of Jimmy 's sexual entanglements or the violence that stalks the production, which first-timer Ifkovic casts with historical figures and suspicious-looking ex-girlfriends and ex-buddies.

Ferber makes an appealing if unlikely detective and Jimmy Dean a splendidly charismatic enigma. But the moody, weepy star, the prize orchid in this Hollywood hothouse, sucks the air out of the tale, leaving the players in the mystery plot gasping for breath.

(COPYRIGHT (2008) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

February 15, 2009
Heres an interesting premise: a mystery narrated by novelist Edna Ferber. Recently arrived in Hollywood, where shooting on the movie version of her novel Giant is about to wrap, Ferber is quite taken with one of the stars of the movie, a brooding young actor named James Dean. When Dean becomes the prime suspect in the death of an actress, Ferber teams up with her old friend, actress Mercedes McCambridge, to clear the actors name. This is Ifkovics first novel, but it reads like it was written by an old pro. The mystery is sharply plotted (with a very clever bit of misdirection), and the setting, 1955 Hollywood, is vividly realized (including cameos by Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor). All the characters, fictional and real, are well drawn, and, even though Deans tragic fate is well known, Ifkovic smartly avoids any maudlin foreshadowing, portraying the actor as an enthusiastic, completely original talent with a long career ahead of himassuming, of course, that Ferber can unmask the real killer. A promising debut in what could be a long-running and highly entertaining series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)