Murder in Disguise

October 17, 2016
In Miley’s highly entertaining third mystery set during the 1920s (after 2014’s Silent Murder), Hollywood “script girl” Jessie Beckett draws on her education in the school of hard knocks as well as her years in vaudeville to track down the killer of a young woman with a taste for blackmail. Jessie’s bosses, movie stars Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Mary Pickford, encourage her investigation after Ruby Glynn, a friend of Miss Pickford’s, is falsely convicted of the crime. Jessie’s quest takes her on trains across a fair amount of the country. Since Prohibition is in force, transporting and stealing booze is big business—and highly dangerous. Meanwhile, Jessie’s sometime lover, once known as the bootleg king of Portland, Ore., claims he’s gone legit, but Jessie isn’t sure. The reader gets a strong sense of what life was like if you were from an outsider group or broke Hollywood’s moral code in public. A middle-of-the-night encounter with the Ku Klux Klan is particularly chilling. All the details of her journey not only advance the story but are fascinating in themselves.

November 1, 2016

In 1920s Hollywood Jessie Beckett works as a script girl for Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and his wife, Mary Pickford. In her third outing (after The Impersonator and Silent Murders), Mary asks Jessie to investigate the death of Lila Walker. The woman convicted of Lila's murder, Ruby Glynn, is a friend of Mary's favorite cameraman, Rob Handler, and neither of them believe Ruby is guilty. Jessie, a former member of a vaudeville troupe, has a knack for uncovering schemes and throws herself into the investigation. Wearing a disguise, she moves into Lila's old boardinghouse and then ends up back on the vaudeville trail, trying to determine who hated Lila enough to kill her. VERDICT With a well-developed and surprising plot twist, an appealing, resourceful amateur detective, and fascinating period details, this entertaining historical will delight fans of Old Hollywood and those who like the 1920s-set mysteries of Suzanne Arruda and George Baxt.

Copyright 2016 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

June 19, 2017
The shooting murder of projectionist Joe Petrovitch, during a showing of Chaplin’s The Gold Rush at a Hollywood movie theater, propels Miley’s engrossing fourth Roaring Twenties mystery (after 2016’s Renting Silence). The police rush to the theater, but the gunman escapes without a trace. The victim’s wife, a hairdresser at the Pickford-Fairbanks Studio, asks script girl Jessie Beckett, who’s a skilled amateur sleuth, to investigate. With help from Adele Astaire (Fred’s glamorous sister and dance partner), actress Myrna Loy (later to achieve fame in The Thin Man), assorted vaudevillians, and police detective Carl Delaney, spunky, resourceful Jessie sets to work. Aficionados of showbiz history will delight in the technical details of filmmaking in the silent era and the peripatetic lives of the performers. Readers will also get the lowdown on bootlegging, speakeasies, and gin joints. Series fans will be pleased to know that David Carr, Jessie’s love interest, has a tidy subplot of his own. Agent: Natasha Kern, Natasha Kern Literary Agency.

June 15, 2017
A woman with a shady past continues to prove a capable amateur sleuth.When Barbara Petrovitch's husband, Joe, is murdered in the movie theater where he serves as a projectionist, she begs Jessie Beckett, who works with her at the Pickford-Fairbanks Studio, to investigate, knowing her success in the past (Renting Silence, 2016, etc.). Douglas Fairbanks agrees to give Jessie some time off, and she soon discovers that Joe, a Serb who sometimes beat Barbara, had a past that was far from an open book. Meanwhile, Helen, one of several women with whom Jessie shares a house, is watching her cousin, Kit Riley, a deaf and mute girl whose mother is off looking for a job. When her mother does not return and sends no word of her whereabouts, Jessie begins to suspect that Kit's hiding her ability to read lips and, indeed, talk. Jessie's beau, David Carr, has just been arrested and Jessie testifies at his murder trial. He beats that rap but is convicted on some lesser charges. Jessie and David both have checkered pasts, but she's now honestly employed, and as far as she knows, David has been successful in selling medicinal alcohol in his drugstores. With a lifetime of background in vaudeville, Jessie, who's been on her own since she was 12, soon figures out that Joe's killer escaped by quickly changing his look and calmly walking out of the theater. She finds several other Serbian men who've been killed in the same way, shot three times in public, but hasn't managed to learn why someone wants them dead. When Kit's mother is found murdered in another city, what Kit has seen and heard in the past go a long way toward helping Jessie solve several crimes. The murders are only the tip of the iceberg in this densely plotted tale. Despite its busy program of felonies, you can't help cheering on the brave heroine and her young helper, both of whom have faced a life of adversity.

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