Mary Miley's Murder in Disguise, a mystery of 1920s Hollywood

The freshness of Jessie Beckett’s narrative voice remains undimmed even after four books. In her latest excursion into amateur detection, set mostly in 1920s Hollywood, Jessie, assistant script girl at Pickford-Fairbanks Studios, investigates the murder of a film projectionist.

A man in a red jacket had sprung into the Lyceum Theater’s projection booth during a Charlie Chaplin film and gunned down Joe Petrovitch, with his shocked assistant looking on. The killer then somehow vanished.

The crime has the markings of a theatrical production, given the perpetrator’s showy clothing, but it could also have been a gangster hit. Joe’s widow, Barbara, one of Jessie’s work colleagues, knows of her crime-solving reputation and requests her help—and in a welcome surprise, a former acquaintance, LA police officer Carl Delaney, agrees to their partnership.

Barbara knows little of Joe’s past, although he was an unpleasant bastard by all accounts, with a history leading back to pre-WWI Europe. Discovering connections sends Jessie around the city and back to her old haunts elsewhere in America.

Jessie’s love life gets put on hold, with her regular fella in legal trouble, which means some new plot directions. Although attracted to Jessie, Carl’s too much the gentleman to push his advantage. Life at Jessie’s boardinghouse also gets shaken up with the arrival of a roommate’s deaf younger cousin, a sullen girl whose quiet cleverness makes her a wonderful character. As a former vaudevillian, Jessie knows all about disguises, so she has ideas on how the killer concealed himself in plain sight. Strangely, she still misses one important clue. I suppose even talented sleuths have off-days.

As always, the Roaring ‘20s atmosphere, from the exciting invention of Technicolor to efforts to curb bootlegging, is worth the price of admission. Because it reveals aspects of previous books’ storylines, though, best not to read this one first.

Murder in Disguise (which I reviewed for the HNR in August) was published by Severn House in August. I recommend all of the books in this series, which begins with The Impersonator, then followed by Silent Murders,  Renting Silence, and finally this newest entry.  Start at the beginning to learn more about the heroine's family background and how she came to be known as Jessie.