cover image Double Exposure

Double Exposure

Jim Stinson. Scribner Book Company, $13.95 (198pp) ISBN 978-0-684-18458-6

Stoney Winston, Harvard grad and would-be Hollywood script-writer, is functioning meanwhile as a general factotumprop-man, ""director,'' anything that pays the rentfor the shifty operator of a grubby little studio making sexy soda-pop commercials. Suddenly everything changes: an 18-year-old girl specializing in straight hard-core pron is missing; her stepmother is being blackmailed to pay up or a particularly damning film will be released and she will face certain ruin in business. Can Stoneytough-talking, without illusions, endowed with an uncommon gift for finding anythingfind film and girl? The hunt will lead him through the porn foundries and other moral sewers of movieland, through bloodshed and assorted mayhem. Stinson is clever and witty, and his hero is often too much of a wise-guy for his ownand the reader'sgood, but this is a literate mystery and an entertaining read. November