REVIEW: PRETTY AS A PICTURE, BY ELIZABETH LITTLE

Marissa Dahl, a shy but successful film editor, travels to a small island off the coast of Delaware to work with the legendary—and legendarily demanding—director Tony Rees on a feature film with a familiar logline.

Some girl dies.

It’s not much to go on, but the specifics don’t concern Marissa. Whatever the script is, her job is the same. She’ll spend her days in the editing room, doing what she does best: turning pictures into stories.

But she soon discovers that on this set, nothing is as it’s supposed to be—or as it seems. There are rumors of accidents and indiscretions, of burgeoning scandals and perilous schemes. Half the crew has been fired. The other half wants to quit. Even the actors have figured out something is wrong. And no one seems to know what happened to the editor she was hired to replace.

Then she meets the intrepid and incorrigible teenage girls who are determined to solve the real-life murder that is the movie’s central subject, and before long, Marissa is drawn into the investigation herself.

The only problem is, the killer may still be on the loose. And he might not be finished.

As I slowly immersed myself in Pretty as a Picture, I was fascinated to be inside our first person narrator’s head as she showed us the world of film making from her perspective. As the film editor, Marissa had a very unique view of that world.It didn’t take long for the reader to realize that the movie making world Marissa had stumbled into would be different than usual. Something was going on, and danger was all around.

The teenage girls who sneaked around the hotel were interesting in their junior detective mode, but soon Marissa would realize they had insights that would help solve the old murder…and the dangerous things happening in the current situation.

Several red herrings kept me off guard through most of the story…but then, at the end, the culprit turned out to be almost too obvious to be true. 4 stars.

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