PRETTY AS A PICTURE

A maniacal movie director, an isolated island, and a decades-old murder--an addictive new novel from the award-winning author Elizabeth Little who returns with a gripping and funny new mystery starring an unlikely female sleuth.

Marissa is unusually talented at reading pictures. A film editor in Los Angeles, she can look at a single frame and use it to tell an entire story. She's a little odd, and her social skills are underdeveloped, but in the editing booth she can see what others can't. Between gigs in L.A., she accepts a secretive offer to edit a movie that's shooting on Kickout Island, off the coast of Delaware. Once she arrives, she finds out the director is domineering, the actors are unstable, and they all may or may not be trapped on the island. The movie is about the real-life murder of wealthy teenager Caitlyn Kelly. Twenty years since Caitlyn's death, someone in the hotel seems determined to stop the film from ever being made.

As Marissa becomes further involved with unsettling events occurring on set, she realizes that not only is the film shoot in danger, but that anyone looking too closely at Caitlyn Kelly's death is too. What happened to the first film editor they hired? Why is the director so obsessed with this story? And what clues will Marissa find hiding in the movie's footage? Award-winning author Elizabeth Little returns with a gripping and funny new mystery starring an unlikely female sleuth.

Elizabeth Little excels at inhabiting the voices of strong, one-of-a-kind, and funny female characters. She did it with Janie Jenkins in DEAR DAUGHTER, and has done it again with Marissa.

PRETTY AS A PICTURE takes the classic island mystery trope and plays with it inside a secretive film set. It's an inventive take, and Elizabeth Little executes it perfectly. Her previous novel DEAR DAUGHTER was named the winner of the Strand Critics Award for Best First Novel, nominated for the Macavity award for Best First Mystery Novel Award and the Barry Award for Best First Novel, and longlisted for the CWA John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award in the UK.

Elizabeth Little is a graduate of Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their son. Her husband is a film director and she's used her insider knowledge of Hollywood and film sets. She is an obsessive film aficionada with an encyclopedic brain for movies.