Lights, Camera, Black Pine: Inside the Set of a Hollywood Cozy Mystery

“The Cove also served as a hotspot for industry insiders who had brought their film crews to Black Pine, where their production dollars stretched farther and taxes were cheaper. Georgia had become a mini-Hollywood in the last five years... The industry had learned words like ‘unsweet tea,’ and ‘shopping buggy,’ and ‘y'all.’”  — 16 Millimeters

Before I ever wrote a body double into a Maizie Albright mystery, Georgia had already become one for Hollywood. Tax incentives brought the crews; the crews brought the sound stages; and somewhere between the craft services table and the golf carts zipping extras across a studio lot, I had my setting for Book 2.

16 Millimeters is a romantic comedy mystery about what happens when Hollywood doesn't just visit Black Pine — it moves in.

In the book, a major producer named Leonard Shackleton needs a babysitter. Not for a kid — for his leading lady, a hot-mess starlet named Cambria (“Cam-Cams” to everyone unlucky enough to be on set with her), who's one meltdown away from tanking his movie. Maizie, still trying to prove she can be a real detective and not just someone who played one on TV, takes the job against her mentor's better judgment. Here's how Shackleton puts it:

“We're filming in and around Black Pine as you've gathered. The movie is an epic role for her. Our director loves her work, and he wants her on this project. But Cambria's a hot mess. The world doesn't know it yet, but she's one meltdown away from... Even with the bond, we had to work in the babysitting clause to get the underwriter to agree to the policy.”  — Leonard Shackleton, 16 Millimeters

The movie itself — an Appalachian epic called Pine Hollow, all “ancient secrets in the mountains” drama — is being shot on a lot that's basically a small industry unto itself: offices, workshops, sound stages, and a crew hammering together a spaceship and an old-timey still in the same afternoon (that's a real detail from the book, not a metaphor — two entirely different productions sharing warehouse space).

It's the kind of organized chaos that made this setting so much fun to write, and it's exactly where things start going wrong for Maizie: her starlet turns up dead. Then not dead. Then Maizie's chasing a missing corpse instead of a missing person, trying to figure out who'd want to hurt an actress everyone already wanted to fire.

Body doubles, dead bodies, and hot bodies abound — wait, what? That's the actual back-cover line, and it undersells how much fun this one is to read if you like your mysteries with a little Hollywood chaos stirred in.

The Sale:

16 Millimeters (Maizie Albright Star Detective, Book 2) is $0.99 through this weekend. Grab it the Hollywood cozy mystery from your favorite store by using this link: books2read.com/16

And if you've already read it — thank you, and stick around, because the newsletter this week has a giveaway that ties this book to a certain upcoming one with its own movie-set mystery.

Tap for 16 MILLIMETERS at your favorite store