Cast the First Stone: An Ellie Stone Mystery | James W. Ziskin
February 1962: Tony Eberle has just scored his first role in a Hollywood movie, and the publisher of his hometown newspaper in upstate New York wants a profile of the local boy who's made good. So reporter Ellie Stone is dispatched to Los Angeles for the story. But when she arrives on the set to meet her subject, Tony has vanished. His agent is apoplectic, his roommate stumped, and the furious director vows Eberle will never work again in his town. Early the following morning, enfant terrible producer Bertram Wallis is discovered dead in the ravine below his mansion in the Hollywood Hills. It appears Wallis fell over the railing of his deck in the small hours after a drunken late-night party. When the police find Tony Eberle's phone number in Wallis's pocket, the young actor is the prime suspect. Ellie jumps on the story but finds that she is unwelcome in the treacherous demimonde of Hollywood wannabes: beautiful young men, desperately ambitious ingénues, panderers, hustlers, and pornography hobbyists. Then there are some real movie stars with reputations to protect and the cops in their pockets. No one wants Ellie to follow the thread that leads to the answer of what happened to Bertram Wallis. Or, for that matter, young Tony Eberle.