Page 44 of Killer on the First Page

“Oh. An audition?”

“Not an audition, an offer. I’m one of the executive producers, sothey have to run the casting past me. You were one of my conditions. If we make Inspector Le Gnash a woman, she has to be played by Miranda Abbott.”

“Oh my.” Miranda felt flushed. “The lead role? In my own series?”

“A pilot, followed by an initial order for twelve episodes, with an automatic pickup for a second season if all goes well, to be filmed in LA.”

“LA?”

“The exteriors would be shot in New England, standing in for Quebec. Everything else would be in LA. Burbank, more specifically.”

“So I would have to leave Happy Rock?”

“Of course!” Penny looked around her. “I Only Read Murder is a remarkable place, Miranda. It is. But in the end, this is really Edgar’s bookstore, isn’t it?”

Miranda’s voice went quiet. “I’m the...” But she couldn’t finish the sentence. Like her marriage, Miranda’s co-ownership of the bookstore existed more on paper than in fact. A technicality. A rounding error.

“We’d be working together! You can move back to Hollywood and be famous again.” Penny caught herself. “Notagain.Still. But now even more so. You get the picture.”

“I do. Fame, as I’ve always said, is two sides of the same coin.”

Escape velocities...

Edgar would later ask her, “What were you and Penny talking about?” and Miranda would say, “Nothing.”

But they hadn’t been talking about nothing; they’d been talking about everything.

And she would ask Edgar, “If I stepped back from my life... in the bookstore. Would it make things easier for you? Or harder?”

But Edgar would deflect. “Nothing ever gets ‘easier’ in the book trade. You know the joke about the owner of a bookstore who winsthe lottery. They ask him what he’s going to do with all the money, and he says, ‘Oh, I suppose I’ll just keep running the store till it’s gone.’”

In some ways, Miranda had won the lottery. The only question was whether she would cash in and cash out. Or carry on.

Meanwhile, tensions were rising in the room. The locals were getting antsy. The authors, surly. Wanda Stobol was shoveling chewable antacids into her maw, Lachlan Todd was pacing like a caged ferret, Ray Valentine was watching everyone with a hostile eye.

The ever-intrepid Scoop Bannister, meanwhile, had pinioned Inez Fonio in one corner, notepad out and pen at the ready.

“So your new character is essentially just Sherlock Holmes?” said Scoop.

A glare from the black-lipped one in her stark white dress. “Not in the least. My cadaverous creation, my hellacious creature of the night—Detective Frankenstein!—has been assembled from the greatest fictional characters of our times. He has the eyes of Dupin, the hands of—”

“Yes, but thebrainis from Sherlock Holmes, so...”

“Mydetective has the girth of Poirot, the—”

“But the brain of Holmes. Your character is basically just Sherlock Holmes in a mismatched body. That’s what matters, right? When it comes to being a detective. The brain?”

A look of doubt had crept into Inez Fonio’s eyes. The tattoo under her eye began to quiver. “I wanted to write about vampyres again, but my agent said vampyres are passé, so...” Her voice trailed off.

Owen comforted her with a squeeze of the shoulder. “Frankensteins are way cooler than vampyres, if you ask me.” He shot Scoop a glance.Why are you hounding her with your relentless queries?

“Thank you,” Inez whispered.

“Rice,” Scoop said brightly.

“Rice?”

“Your name, Fonio. It’s sort of a type of rice. Right?”