Sharpest Needle, The

By Renee Patrick

What happens when your past catches up with you?

Lillian Frost and Edith Head investigate a series of bizarre poison pen letters sent to a leading Hollywood actress in this mesmerising mystery.

1939, Los Angeles. Marion Davies has a problem. The actress has received poison pen letters highlighting an embarrassing event in her past from the mysterious 'Argus'. Can Lillian Frost and her friend and partner-in-crime, celebrated costume designer Edith Head, expose the writer before they expose Marion? Lillian's boss, millionaire inventor Addison Rice, seems to think so, but when Lillian speaks to her idol, Marion is reluctant to reveal her secrets, fearful of jeopardizing her affair with newspaper tycoon W.R. Hearst.

Is a prankster simply trying to tarnish the reputation of one of Hollywood's leading ladies, or is something more sinister going on behind the scenes? As Lillian and Edith are drawn into increasingly dangerous and disturbing territory, their enquiries take an unexpected and stunningly dark twist . . .

• Language: English
• Publisher: Severn House
• Release date: Jan 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781448304745

Renee Patrick

Renee Patrick is the pseudonym for married authors Rosemarie and Vince Keenan. Rosemarie is a research administrator and a poet. Vince is a screenwriter and a journalist. Both native New Yorkers, they currently live in Seattle, Washington. They have written two previous books starring Lillian Frost and Edith Head, Design for Dying and Dangerous to Know. Script for Scandal is their first book for Severn House.

Book preview

ONE

The camel was preparing to spit. I’d seen similar bulging cheeks on the face of my neighborhood newsstand operator. But this beast didn’t have a cuspidor decorously concealed behind the comic books. Instead, it eyed my white shoes.

Standing next to me, Edith Head paid the camel no mind. Easy for her to do, because the diminutive costume designer had opted for sensible black pumps with her gray suit, her sole nod to the summer weather a sparky yellow and blue scarf. Whereas I was bedecked in a style befitting the season, in a pale green rayon dress printed with miniature bouquets of daisies. And, of course, white shoes, which the unruly ungulate now studied like a bombardier taking aim. But then I hadn’t dressed for the camel. I’d selected my wardrobe with our other guest in mind.

‘I’m afraid I don’t know this fella’s name,’ Marion Davies said. ‘I didn’t spend much time with the camels. They remind me too much of horses.’

Even though the closest I’d previously gotten to a camel was on a pack of cigarettes, I could see her point. Each animal had four legs, and you could ride both. But a horse wouldn’t spit on my shoes.

‘You don’t care for horses?’ Edith asked.

‘I love them, but I once fell off one and spent three months in a cast. Not the first time I was plastered, I can tell you that.’ Marion occasionally stammered as she spoke, a flash of vulnerability that made me want to protect her. A beguiling bit of legerdemain, considering she possessed the wherewithal to buy and sell me many times over, with Edith thrown in as part of the bargain. ‘I’m always afraid they’re going to rear back, or turn and bite my foot. I miss our little menagerie, though. I’m glad this fella found a home here.’

Here being a strip of sand alongside a soundstage, an ersatz oasis on the lot of Paramount Pictures, where Edith ran the Wardrobe Department. The camel was on the studio payroll because its former home, the private zoo owned by press baron William Randolph Hearst, was closing down owing to Hearst’s recent financial struggles. Creatures that had once gamboled up the California coast near San Simeon were being scattered to other zoos and movie studios. Maybe that explained the dromedary’s dour demeanor. It had to be a shock to find yourself suddenly working for a living.

As for what I was doing at Paramount, I hoped Marion would eventually shed light on the subject.

She was perhaps best known as the powerful Hearst’s longtime mistress, the two of them openly living together while Mrs Hearst spent most of her time back in my hometown of New York. I would have expected such scandalous behavior to be condemned by staunch Catholics, and indeed the nuns who taught me at St Mary’s in Flushing tutted vigorously whenever a Marion Davies picture opened. But my uncle Danny always shrugged and said, ‘Hearst was a grand man for Roger Casement and the cause of the Irish back in 1916, you know.’ My aunt Joyce made no such allowances. She would simply bless herself and clutch her rosary tighter, refusing even to speak Marion’s name.

But I idolized Marion. As spirited Irish lasses in films like The Bride’s Play and Peg O’ My Heart, in historical epics such as When Knighthood Was in Flower and Little Old New York. I loved her best when she played comedy. In The Patsy, she uproariously sent up her fellow stars: the doleful Lillian Gish, a fiery Pola Negri. I had skipped school to see the picture a third time, a venial sin compounded into a mortal one thanks to the presence of its scarlet woman star. I’d entertained visions of taking some of Marion’s roles when I’d arrived in Los Angeles in 1936, before a calamitous screen test sent me scurrying for a job.

The man who’d seen fit to hire me as his social secretary, millionaire inventor Addison Rice, adored movies and Marion as much as I did. The two of them had become friends and, recently, when she’d run into difficulty, she’d poured her heart out to him. Addison, in turn, had suggested she speak with us. Since striking up our unlikely friendship, Edith and I unraveled our share of knots, mostly of the criminal variety. So here we were on the Paramount lot, with Marion’s visit to her former pet camel as a convenient excuse. But she still hadn’t breathed a word about her problem.

She wore a white flannel skirt and a navy short-sleeved blouse with white polka dots, her navy and white spectators gleaming. Her hair was still blonde, her fortyish frame a touch thicker than when last seen onscreen two years ago opposite Robert Montgomery in Ever Since Eve. Truth be told, I’d never much cared for Marion’s talking pictures; the movies she’d made during my youth were the ones I remembered. She was retired from acting now, the gossip columns chattered, concentrating on her duties as Hearst’s consort and Hollywood’s hostess nonpareil. That left plenty of time, presumably, for her to get into trouble.

‘We had an elephant named after me,’ Marion said nervously. ‘They said it wasn’t. She was supposedly called Marianne, after a picture I’d done, but I knew better. And there was a gorilla named Jerry, although maybe he was a chimpanzee. Such a meanie. He once threw his dirty business at Marie Dressler. I suppose Jerry’s here, too. I’ll bet he has an agent. Probably with the Morris office.’

Edith and I laughed. The camel turned toward us and snorted. I expected expectoration imminently.

What a strange conversation, I thought. So many subjects verboten. I couldn’t mention Marion’s unconventional living arrangements with Hearst, nor Hearst’s ongoing fiscal woes, splashed not so long ago on the cover of Time magazine. And Marion, apparently, couldn’t say what was bothering her.

The camel hocked some unidentifiable matter onto the sand, a good two feet from where we stood. That spurred Marion to action. Her fingers dipped hesitantly into her handbag. ‘Here,’ she said at last. ‘This is why I wanted to talk to you.’

She thrust a piece of paper and a creased envelope at us. I peered over Edith’s shoulder.

MISS DAVIES,

HOW CAN YOU SLEEP UNDER W.R.’S ROOF? DOES HE KNOW YOU HAVE LAIN DOWN WITH LIONS?

ARGUS

The note was handwritten, vivid purple ink providing the ostentation the plain block printing lacked. Several words – SLEEP, LAIN, LIONS – were practically in boldface, the individual letters rendered in slashing, almost angry strokes.

Edith lowered her eyeglasses, as if the adjustment would add context to the correspondence. ‘I can see why this would be distressing. What’s known as a poison pen letter.’

‘Thank you for saying it. With my stammer, the phrase sometimes gives me trouble.’ Marion flashed her cockeyed smile. ‘I’d like to know who this Argus character is.’

‘I assume it’s a reference to Argus Panoptes. A figure from Greek myth. The all-seeing giant with one hundred eyes.’

‘A hundred?’ Marion recoiled. ‘He must have kept his optician happy.’

Edith appraised the envelope. ‘Do you know what this letter refers to?’

‘No.’ Marion shook her head, her performance broad.

Edith accepted the denial. ‘Any guesses as to what it might be?’

‘I haven’t the foggiest.’

Cut, I wanted to say. Let’s try another one, Marion, where you’re more believable. Instead, I chose another tack. ‘Addison told us other people received letters.’

‘Yes. People I used to work with, in the old days. That’s what made me panic. I paid no mind to the letter at first. I’ve gotten things like it before, plenty of times. Blackmail demands. Someone sent explosives to the beach house in 1931, absolutely ruined my plans for the holidays. But when this Argus started writing to other people …’

Edith nodded sagely while I gawped at Marion, thinking, explosives? The camel swung its ancient head toward me, encouraging me to get on with it.

‘Who else received letters?’ I asked.

‘Clarence Baird, for one. A dear old friend – used to do my makeup for pictures. He got a strange letter and thought nothing of it at first. Then he played pinochle with Rudi Vollmer and Rudi mentioned he’d gotten one, too.’

‘That name sounds familiar,’ Edith said.

‘An assistant director. He worked here at Paramount for a while. I didn’t know what to think when Rudi telephoned me. Then he described the notes, all purple ink signed by this Argus, and I had the boys over to the beach house at once.’

‘Did their letters specify any event in particular?’ Edith asked.

Marion shifted her shoulders, not quite shrugging. ‘Not really, no. We have to guess, I suppose.’ What knowledge her anonymous correspondent possessed, she wasn’t going to share with us.

Edith seemed undaunted. ‘When did Mr Baird and Mr Vollmer receive their letters in relation to this one?’

‘That one?’ Marion contemplated her purse. It was calfskin, with gold accents. ‘I’d heard from Argus first, obviously. Theirs came a few days later. Less than a week. They can tell you.’

‘Yes, about that,’ Edith said. ‘It’s our understanding you want us to speak to them?’

‘I told them to expect your call. I’d like to get to the bottom of this business. The idea of someone pestering my friends bothers me no end.’

‘If I might ask,’ I ventured. ‘You could always have the police look into it.’

‘Yes, but I would prefer not to. It’s just … I’m sure you’ve seen all the dreadful publicity W.R. has gotten these last few months. And now he’s being forced to – what’s the word? – liquidate his art collection, which is breaking his heart. I don’t want to add to his woes.’

‘Perfectly understandable,’ Edith said in her most pacifying tone. ‘But there are other options, agencies that do this kind of work—’

‘You mean hire some dirty little window-peeper who’ll turn around and sell the story to the gossip columns?’ Marion gave a wonderful theatrical laugh. ‘No thank you.’

Those same gossip columns also reported that W.R. had, from time to time, hired dirty little window-peepers of his own to follow Marion while he was making nice with his wife in New York. Little wonder she was sour on the notion.

‘I imagine it’s the strain of W.R.’s hardships that have gotten to me.’ Marion pressed the back of her wrist to her forehead, displaying the kind of corny histrionics for which she’d once mocked Lillian Gish. ‘That’s why that night at the beach house I slipped away from my own party. Addison found me, and I cried on his shoulder a spell. He told me about you ladies, how you’d gotten so good at figuring things out but doing it quietly, with no fuss. He said you two were just what the doctor ordered.’

I made a note to pay Addison for the build-up.

Marion smiled at the camel. ‘That’s why I’m taking advantage of ol’ Lumpy, pretending I’m here visiting an old friend from the ranch instead of asking you two for help. I’d like to know who’s saying terrible things about me to my friends and get them to stop.’

Edith glanced at me. We’d already discussed how we planned to respond.

‘Mythology tells us that the one hundred eyes of Argus Panoptes were eventually lulled to sleep,’ she said. ‘We’re happy to do what we can to help.’

‘Wonderful!’ Marion clapped her hands like a little girl witnessing a magic trick. The camel bobbed its head, granting us its benediction. Its cheeks began to puff again.

What was the line from the Bible? It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.

Out of respect for William Randolph Hearst, I opted not to voice the sentiment aloud. Besides, if anyone had a needle large enough for ol’ Lumpy’s passage, it would be Edith.

TWO

After our farewells to Marion, we strode across the lot, Edith setting the pace despite being half a foot shorter than me. I spritzed myself with perfume as we walked, not wanting to be swathed in eau de ruminant for the rest of the day.

‘What’s Ol’ Lumpy doing here, anyway?’ I asked.

‘I trust you mean the camel and not me,’ Edith said. ‘The studio is taking additional publicity photographs for Beau Geste, so I asked John Engstead to use one of the animals purchased from the Hearst ranch.’

‘Conveniently giving Marion an explanation for her visit. Aren’t you clever? I hope you have another brainwave when it comes to helping her. How are we supposed to get to the bottom of this without knowing what that letter refers to?’

‘Letters.’

‘Right, the ones sent to Baird and Vollmer. We haven’t seen those yet.’

‘No, I mean Miss Davies has heard from Argus more than once. I’m certain of it. The letter she showed us doesn’t read like an opening gambit. It’s not explicit enough. It seems more like a follow-up, a taunt. Also, I noticed Miss Davies selected this letter from her purse rather deliberately. I imagine the other missives were in there, including earlier ones that are more specific about what Argus knows. I tried coaxing her into coming clean when I asked when her friends had received their letters in relation to the one she showed us. She held fast to her story. Likely a white lie, but a forgivable one under the circumstances.’

‘She’s lying down with lions and meeting with a camel. Maybe she ought to look for an ark.’

‘We’d need a second camel.’

‘Call the Morris office. It’s strange. Marion never stammers in her pictures.’

‘The camera brings out the best in some of us. And the worst in others.’

‘Is that a reference to my screen test?’

I angled toward the Wardrobe building and Edith’s office, but she didn’t follow suit. ‘It’s such a lovely day, and I could stand a stroll. Care to accompany me?’

I was beginning to perspire, but if Edith could take the late afternoon heat, so could I. With another blast of perfume, I scurried after her.

She kept talking as if my acceptance were a foregone conclusion. ‘I doubt there’s much we can do to assist Miss Davies beyond speaking with the gentlemen who were also contacted by this mysterious Argus. If there is, you may have to carry on alone.’

‘The usual forts to hold?’

‘There’s always one under siege. Right now, it’s a picture called Remember the Night. Preston wrote the script. It’s delightful, the best thing he’s done.’

Preston being Preston Sturges, bon vivant and Paramount’s premiere scribe. ‘Tell me it’s a comedy,’ I said.

‘It is, but it’s also a love story. About a shoplifter and a prosecutor forced to spend the holidays together. It tugs at the heartstrings in ways I didn’t expect from Preston. And the cast! Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray.’

Two of my favorite actors, both of whom I’d had the pleasure of meeting through Edith. ‘Sounds like old home week,’ I said. ‘But the production’s giving you problems?’

‘Not the production.’ Edith slowed her pace and lowered her voice, lest the bushes we passed have ears. ‘It’s Mitchell Leisen. He’s directing.’

‘I’m a fan. He did The Big Broadcast movies and Midnight.’

‘Mitch and I have known each other a while. He can be something of a handful, so I’m doing my best to anticipate.’

For Edith to mention such a difficulty in passing meant it was keeping her up nights. I struggled to think of words of encouragement, as if I had it in my power to buck her up.

We reached one of the gates leading on to Melrose Avenue. Edith waltzed through it and I expected alarums and klaxons to sound, alerting the Paramount populace that she had left the lot. I was about to ask where we were going – maybe to Oblath’s for a cup of coffee or something stronger to fortify her for battle with Mitchell Leisen – when she changed the subject.

‘How have you been? Are you seeing anyone?’

‘I’m pretty sure the milkman has been making eyes at me. And I might give the time of day to my newsstand operator. Only has one arm, but does he know how to hit a spittoon.’

‘And Detective Morrow? Have your paths crossed lately?’

Ah, yes. Detective Gene Morrow, Los Angeles Police Department. My once-steady fellow, a man I’d met at the same time Edith had come into my life, and for the same sad reason, the death of my erstwhile roommate. Gene and I had had a falling out, the typical squabble all young couples face: a stolen twenty thousand dollars and the movie made about the theft. No doubt Clark Gable and Carole Lombard routinely faced similar strife. I had rallied to Gene’s cause, but my role in vindicating his name had provoked a chill between us.

‘Once or twice,’ I said truthfully, omitting that the occasions we’d gotten together over the past months had felt like they were overseen by an invisible chaperone, a presence inhibiting our usual easy conversation. I finally understood that we were being haunted by our former selves, the ghosts of happier people who had made different choices, spoken other words, and consequently still felt comfortable together.

‘Good.’ Edith patted my hand. ‘It’s important to keep the lines open.’ She would continue to push, I knew, as if my relationship with Gene were a dress I hadn’t properly accessorized. When the truth was maybe I didn’t like the dress’s color anymore. Maybe I’d outgrown it.

Or maybe the truth was I didn’t know what the truth was, and didn’t care to admit it.

We turned a corner onto Gower Street. ‘I have a surprise for you,’ Edith announced. As we were heading toward Hollywood Cemetery, I didn’t immediately react with glee. Then Edith veered toward the entrance to the RKO lot, which I’d never set foot on before. Edith exchanged words with a guard at the gate. He cheerily waved us through, and that old familiar tingle rose up in my belly like flowers seeking the sun. Once again, I had been vouchsafed a peek behind the curtain, to see where movies were made. It was magic time.

The long and narrow RKO lot, wedged between Paramount and the graveyard, felt cramped in comparison to the spacious studio next door. But it was also where Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced together, so the available room was being used as well as was humanly possible. I periscoped my neck, searching for the talented twosome. Perhaps they needed someone clumsy to waltz past in order to make them look perfect.

‘Don’t bother gawking,’ Edith cautioned. ‘You already know who we’re here to see. Half of them, anyway.’

‘Half? What do you mean?’

The answer waved from a doorway. Bill Ihnen had been Edith’s friend and colleague for years, an art director as talented as he was modest. His balding pate glimmered in the sun, yet he hadn’t doffed his nub-tweed tan sport coat with patch pockets. Eagerness crackled around him as he gave us each an affectionate kiss. ‘I was about to dispatch a search party. Ladies, I have someone I’d like you to meet.’

The cool of the screening room came as a relief. Bill’s demeanor had me feeling antsy, too, so I was surprised to see no one in the theater save for a youngish man wedged uncomfortably into a seat, hair tousled, legs in gray slacks extending into the aisle and ending in a pair of loafers. I glimpsed rolled-up shirt sleeves and a brick-red sweater vest, a blazer flung carelessly over a nearby chair. From behind, he looked like a college student trying to nap on the train home to Mother.

Then Bill proclaimed, ‘Our guests have arrived,’ and the fellow stood up. He still resembled an ungainly boy, the Mephistophelean beard he’d grown doing a middling job of masking his youth. I recognized Orson Welles at once. The wunderkind, fresh from triumphs on stage in New York City and on radio from coast to coast, had been signed by RKO earlier that summer to conquer his next medium: pictures. His photograph had been in the newspapers every day since his arrival in Los Angeles, sandwiched between Norma Shearer and Helen Hayes at the Trocadero, escorting up-and-coming actress Lucille Ball to a premiere. The gossip columns tracked his every movement, taking pains to mention the absence of his young wife, Virginia. (‘Allergic to California living, claims Welles.’) The whole town, it seemed, was waiting to see if the boy wonder would slip on a banana peel. From some accounts, they weren’t above strewing a few in his path.

‘At last,’ Welles boomed in that voice I had thrilled to on The Shadow, rattling rafters in adjacent buildings. He bounded over to greet us, all at once startlingly agile, teeth gleaming through the dark growth of beard. The novelist Louis Bromfield, according to the papers, had offered a prize to anyone who ‘accidentally’ burned those whiskers off Welles’s face.

Bill made the introductions, for which Welles immediately took him to task. ‘Such humility. I can’t abide that quality in anyone, seeing as I’m so sorely lacking in it. Bill’s not telling you why he and I are here. I’m watching Stagecoach over and over. Can’t think of a better picture from which to learn. And possibly pilfer a few tricks. I’m making a point of seeing it in the company of the craftsmen who made it. Bowing at their feet so I may steal their secrets. Bill is tonight’s guest of honor.’

‘I was only an associate,’ Bill said softly.

‘More of that unbecoming humility. Have you ladies seen the picture?’

‘Twice,’ I said.

‘You’ll stay for a third time, I hope. Although Bill will be tutoring me over it.’ He shook my hand, his own dwarfing mine. I remembered that this man, who had already accomplished so much, was two years younger than me. I waited for my elderly bones to creak in his velvet grip.

He pirouetted to Edith. ‘And as a devout follower of your work, dear lady, I want to hear anything you have to say on the subject of costumes. Easily my favorite part of production. They’ve fascinated me ever since we did Julius Caesar at school, and the togas were sheets torn right off the beds. No one could go to sleep until the curtain fell. That’s one way to guarantee an audience.’ His laughter at the memory stripped more years from his age. Eyes alight, shoulders shaking, the very shape of his face seemed to change as he delighted in his own reaction. He no longer resembled an overgrown boy but an enormous baby, albeit one sporting spinach on his chin and cheeks.

Conversation continued as we took our seats. ‘You don’t have family in Wisconsin, do you, Edith?’ Welles asked.

‘I don’t believe so.’

‘My great-grandfather was Orson Head. Named after him, you see. As for his daughter, my grandmother, a diabolical woman. Truly. Animal sacrifices on the lawn every Saturday. Upset the neighbors terribly. Let’s pretend that we’re blood kin, with you from a different and far superior line of the clan.’ Edith could only nod in response to his onslaught of charisma.

Welles then aimed his allure at me, asking what I did. I mentioned Addison and he declared himself an admirer. Somehow I let slip that I’d worked at Tremayne’s Department Store when I first came to Los Angeles, and Welles leaned toward me. ‘There’s something we have in common. As a boy in Chicago I got a job at Marshall Field’s. They dressed me up as the White Rabbit, you know, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Off I’d hop through the store, pulling out my little pocket watch and crying, Oh, I must hurry – or it will be too late to see the woolen underwear on the eighth floor!’ He laughed again, with enough force to split his beaming face in two.

Bill brought up Welles’s plans to mount an adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as his debut film. ‘From what I hear, it sounds like an ambitious production.’

‘If we get it off the ground. Adapted it before for The Mercury Theater on the Air, so I know it rather well. Updating it to South America today, but making it about Europe. Hitler and that crowd. It’s a fantastic story Conrad wrote. The main character dying with an enigmatic phrase on his lips.’

‘That’ll be you, I expect, as Kurtz,’ Bill said. ‘Who’s going to play your Marlow?’

‘I am!’ Seeing Bill’s confused face, Welles leaned toward him. ‘I’m quite serious. A putty nose and this beard for Kurtz, freshly shorn as Marlow. Lunacy of the sheerest kind, you’re thinking, and you’d be right. But it’s the only way I know how to work, with my reach exceeding my grasp. And I’ll be learning on the job. Hence today’s lesson.’ He waved at the screen.

‘How many times have you seen Stagecoach?’ I asked.

‘Easily a dozen, with me picking up something new each time. I missed watching it the last few nights. I was roped into attending one of those star-studded premieres at the Chinese Theater. For The Wizard of Oz.’

‘I can’t wait to see that,’ I burbled.

‘Walter Plunkett’s costumes must be a marvel,’ Edith said.

‘He certainly made more for that film than he did for Stagecoach.’ Welles shook his head. ‘It’s a bizarre experience, being at a pageant like that. The crowds, all those recognizable faces. I wonder if I’ll ever get used to it.’

‘You won’t.’ I affected a wisdom I didn’t feel. ‘It’s still strange to me, seeing people from the movies in person.’

‘Lifesize,’ Welles intoned.

‘Especially ones I grew up watching. Like Marion Davies.’

I bit my tongue at the precise moment Edith politely kicked me. So much

Reviews for Sharpest Needle, The

[vesper1931 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

1939 Los Angeles. Retired actress Marion Davies, among others, has received a poison pen letters. On hearing about the activities of Lillian Frost and Edith Head she asked them to investigate. But then a murder occurs and the next letter states their demands.
An enjoyable cozy historical well-written mystery with a selection of likeable characters. Another good addition to the series which can be read as a standalone story.
An ARC was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

[nadinec.keels · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

When a fading star in 1939 Hollywood keeps receiving letters from an anonymous sender threatening to destroy her reputation, she calls on Lillian Frost and Lillian's friend, film costume designer Edith Head, to get to the bottom of it. But getting to the bottom of what appears to be a prank will become increasingly dangerous in The Sharpest Needle by authors Renee Patrick.Well, I'm four books into the Lillian Frost & Edith Head mystery series by this husband-and-wife team of co-authors writing under one pseudonym. Like the novels that precede it, this fourth book is glinting with glamour from the Golden Age of Hollywood—juxtaposed with sensitive secrets, hazardous intrigues, and the encroaching shadow of impending world war touching it all.Now, given how much I appreciate the dashes of dry, clever humor in Lillian's narration of her experiences, I'm not altogether sure why I haven't warmed up to her more. Although I understand her, she hasn't fully come alive for me. Also, the romantic (?) side of her life still hasn't given me anything satisfying as a reader, and I'll admit the conclusion of this mystery left me feeling a little ungratified.Yet, I didn't foresee each of the plot twists as they happened, and as I'm a growing fan of historical mysteries, something in the overall build-up of this series keeps me curious and has me hooked. I'm staying on the lookout for a Book Five.

[cathyskye · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

With occasional snippets from gossip columns, visits to "houses of beauty" catering to the elite, and descriptions of 1930s clothing, the writing team known as Renee Patrick (Rosemarie and Vince Keenan) plant readers so firmly into the soil of Hollywood that they can't help but try to catch glimpses of Clark Gable and Errol Flynn. The Keenans have a deep knowledge of Hollywood (you may have seen them on Turner Classic Movies), so even though you may have a phobia of writers using historical personages as characters, you might change your mind after reading The Sharpest Needle. I've enjoyed this series from the first book-- Design for Dying-- and I like the way the Keenans handle their historical characters: fun, light, and sticking as closely to the facts as possible. As the personal assistant to a millionaire, Lillian Frost has the ability to take time off to investigate as long as she stays up-to-date with her work. Edith Head, as the head of Paramount Picture's insanely busy costume department, is mainly Lillian's friend and advisor who has a fierce intelligence, an eye for detail, and a wealth of contacts. Through Head, readers get to see what she had to put up with in order to become the best costume designer Hollywood has ever seen. Through millionaire Addison Rice's contacts, Lillian Frost can be invited almost anywhere, and in this fourth book, she gets to wander Hearst Castle. As we see the grounds and learn of William Randolph Hearst's collecting habits, I was reminded of a scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. I was longing for a time machine so I could be transported back. Just turn me loose and let me explore, pretty please! As good as the characters and the setting are, the mystery is every bit as good. There are many paths to follow before readers finally begin to learn what's really going on. If you enjoy multi-layered historical mysteries with strong characters and a fantastic sense of place, you can't go wrong with Renee Patrick's Lillian Frost & Edith Head series. You can jump right in with The Sharpest Needle, but don't be surprised if you find yourself looking for the other three. They're quite addictive! (Review copy courtesy of the publisher and Net Galley)