Star Struck

March 15, 2024
Murder and a host of lesser but more time-consuming complications dog the production of costumer Joey Jessop's latest film project. An unknown woman running from a restaurant is struck and killed by a silver Lexus SUV. It's a painful moment for everyone involved, but especially for Joey, who'd seen the woman dragged and chased out of the restaurant kitchen minutes earlier by a cook and another menacing man and hadn't said anything about it. Tyrone Thomas, the head of the studio producing The Golden Age, which is filming nearby, is less interested in encouraging his crew to cooperate with the police than in making sure no whiff of bad publicity touches his stars. And so much intrigue swirls around leading lady Gillian Best--from her quarrel with personal assistant Rita Ranucci to her hush-hush exchange with personal manager Dan Lomax to her unpublicized relationship with personal videographer Armand Dubois--that keeping it all under wraps is likely to be a full-time job. But not for Joey, whose full-time job, once costume designer Gregory Bentham is called back to England by his husband's illness and the production's deal with boutique Italian costume manufacturer Bergati falls through, is arranging for the last-minute design and construction of hundreds of World War I-era costumes for a movie whose story McCown, intent on the worm's-eye view, never bothers to share. Another violent death will provide a sop to genre fans, but this is really a relentlessly detailed account of the thousands of obstacles to producing a movie. Sorry, Sherlock. Detective work has nothing on the perils of costume design.

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April 15, 2024
Hollywood costume designer McCown squanders her backstage expertise in the unwieldy second mystery featuring costumer Joey Jessop (after Final Cut). For her latest gig, Joey is sourcing 1930s looks for a period drama starring A-list actors Gillian Best and Andrew de Rossi. Near set one day, Joey witnesses a young woman flee across a busy L.A. street, only to be mowed down and killed by a silver SUV that quickly drives away. While trying to ascertain who the victim was fleeing from, and why she was so terrified, Joey learns that the SUV belonged to Best. Her suspicions ratchet up another level when Best’s disgruntled former assistant is found dead of an apparent suicide after a fight with her old boss. With the police uninterested in investigating any connection between the deaths, and Best well-protected by the Hollywood machine, Joey tries to determine whether she’s working with a certified monster before the body count rises higher. McCown captures the mundane operations of the movie business with a welcome wink, but her storytelling is tangled: a subplot about Joey uncovering nonunion costume labor goes nowhere, and the mystery is resolved with an unsatisfying contrivance. This misses the mark. Agent: Ann Collette, Rees Literary.