THE BRINK OF FAME

1914 Hollywood beckons a fledgling filmmaker.

New Jersey isn’t big enough to hold Emily Daggett Weiss and her husband Adam, who’d developed a small filmmaking company in the Garden State. Now Emily is following Adam to Arizona with plans to make a movie in a desert setting. Before she reaches Flagstaff, Holbert Bruns, a detective she’d met while involved in a New Jersey murder case (The Edge of Ruin, 2010), joins the train. His presence turns out to be lucky for Emily, for when she arrives in Flagstaff, she discovers that Adam has lost their movie company in a poker game and taken off for Mexico with a starlet and plans for a quick divorce. Luckily, Bruns offers to take on the destitute Emily as an assistant in a missing persons case. The pair travel to Hollywood, where Emily is promised a chance to direct a movie for film tycoon Carl Laemmle if she can help find his missing star Ross McHenry, who belonged to the mysterious Krotona movement. Emily soon becomes entangled with Krotona leader Mrs. Kazanow, the wife of the man who won the movie studio from Adam. As the plot thickens, Bruns wants to keep her on as a detective, but Emily is determined to become a director—as soon as she solves a bizarre murder case the studio wants hushed up.

Stubbornly determined Emily is a lot more focused than the meandering plot. Will she become a director? Will she hook up with the handsome detective? Stay tuned for the next installment.