Stanley Hastings, ambulance-chasing private detective and wannabe writer, has finally hit the big time. An award-winning producer wants to make a movie of his screenplay! It sounds too good to be true and it is, of course. The production starts with finding a homeless man dead in the elevator of the building hired for the shoot and pretty much goes downhill from there. A short, nerdy leading man (albeit, a "star") who rewrites or ad libs as he pleases, a meglamaniac director who makes Stanley add scenes and write in characters that make no sense at all, a series of bizarre accidents, and finally a murder. If you pay very close attention and work your brain hard enough, you can probably figure out who the culprit is, but it takes Stanley's wife, the roudoubtable Alice, to get to the why of the thing.
I didn't care for this book at all. I was very disappointed, as I have thoroughly enjoyed the other Stanley Hastings books I've read, but this one was very different.
