STAR STRUCK

It’s hard to get a good interview out of material like Shane King, the baby mogul of Calistoga Pictures who doesn’t seem to know his right hand from his left. And it’s even harder when Shane’s dead in his hot tub of a heroin overdose. Nothing daunted, Quinn Collins, the Hollywood Star reporter whose appointment Shane ducked, allows his father Peter, the movie director she had a fling with years before his career took a nose-dive, to talk her into looking into his death. At first, Shane’s life seems as bland as his blond good looks, even though his girlfriend Tiffany Novotny, a main-chance starlet, agrees with his father that the fatal overdose years before of Shane’s older brother Rhett made it impossible that Shane would ever start using. But a big surprise is waiting for Quinn: Tiffany, who seems barely smart enough to buckle her own shoes, must know something about her meal-ticket’s demise, because she’s lured up to Big Sur with the promise of a nonexistent movie job and run off a cliff. Since the Big Sur cops are just as eager as their Malibu colleagues to close the case as a suicide, it’ll be up to Quinn to go poking into a fourth suspicious death in the past—an excursion that seems designed to conceal the absence of interesting present-day suspects or, ultimately, a compelling murderer.

Despite its brevity, the debut that Jacobs (Double or Nothing, 2001, etc.) has arranged for statuesque Quinn is so diffuse it’s hard to imagine how she got her job as a Hollywood reporter.