Stone Cold Dead
Stone Cold Dead is the third of Ziskin’s mysteries featuring Ellie Stone, reporter for the newspaper, the Republic, in New Holland, New York. On New Year’s Eve, 1960, her private celebration with a seaman she met at a party is interrupted by Irene Metzger. Irene’s fifteen-year-old daughter is missing, and based on Ellie’s prior investigative reporting of a murder, she believes Ellie can help her.
Ellie is young but tough. She drinks too much and holds her own in the sexism of the newsroom and the anti-Semitism of her adopted upstate New York home. By a strange coincidence, Ellie had met the missing girl, Darleen Hicks. Darleen came to Ellie’s aid at a high school basketball game when she was sick after drinking too much, but she also made off with Ellie’s pint of whiskey. Ziskin deftly paints a portrait of both Ellie and Darleen with that encounter.
Ellie’s investigations make her an enemy of Darleen’s brutal stepfather, Dick Metzger, and the unwilling love interest of Darleen’s boyfriend, Joey Faglio. He’s locked up in juvenile detention but keeps escaping and threatening Ellie with his attentions. While she has the support of her editor at the paper, her reporting rival, George Walsh, is the publisher’s son-in-law and constantly undermines her. It’s a credit to Ziskin’s characterization of Ellie that she’s not defeated by what seems to be a bleak life in this small town. Instead, she has friends both in town and on the police force who have her back. Her drinking raises several eyebrows, and I have a feeling it will have to be addressed in a future installment. I look forward to the story she tackles next.
