One Death at a Time

I was fully prepared to hate this book right up until chapter nine, which is also when I should warn you this review talks about the ending and the killer, so if you care about the mystery, stop reading now. Up until that chapter, I was rolling my eyes at the sheer amount of money on the page. Then a twenty five year old gig worker named Natasha Mason finds herself standing in a hospital room dealing with a beautiful, tragic suspect who refuses to eat. The suspect is doing a delicate dying swan routine, and everyone else is tiptoeing around her. Instead of offering sympathy, Mason yells at her to eat the goddamned hospital Jell-O and stop being a chickenshit. That was the exact moment my opinion flipped. I know what it is like to deal with people who think their personal drama excuses them from basic manners, and I instantly trusted an author who let her main character call it out.

The setup of One Death at a Time is practically designed to trigger my resentment. Julia Mann is an older, ridiculously wealthy former actress who won an Oscar decades ago, went to prison for fifteen years for supposedly killing her husband, and now lives in an architectural marvel that literally straddles a canyon. The book opens with her finding her former best friend and studio head, Tony Eckenridge, floating dead in her infinity pool with a bullet in his head. Julia is fresh off a bender, meaning she has no memory of the night and her fingerprints are on the murder weapon. She needs someone to help her investigate the murder before the police arrest her again, which is where Mason comes in. Mason meets her at a twelve step recovery meeting and somehow gets drafted into being her personal assistant.

The reason the book works is entirely because of Mason. She is a twenty five year old temp worker who drives for a rideshare app, worries constantly about making her rent, and just spent two thousand dollars she did not have to save a three legged stray cat. When we first meet her, she is walking back to her car with a coffee only to find a parking ticket jammed under her wiper. That is a real morning. She is sober, exhausted, and running on caffeine and stubbornness. She agrees to work for Julia mostly because the gig economy is drying up and she needs the cash. Watching her navigate the demands of a boss who has completely lost touch with how much normal things cost is the most authentic part of the story. She does not perform gratitude; she just does the work.

The dynamic between the two women carries the entire plot. Julia is demanding, incredibly arrogant, and prone to giving orders without any consideration for logistics. She expects Mason to just materialize whatever she needs. But Mason pushes back and sets boundaries. When Julia tells her to steam a vintage Issey Miyake dress in the back of a moving classic car on the way to a funeral, Mason just points out that she has never used a steamer for anything other than broccoli. They negotiate a bizarre working relationship built on mutual irritation and eventual respect. Julia pays well, but she also expects Mason to dodge bullets, break into country clubs, and act as a bodyguard. It is the ultimate bad service industry job, transposed into a mansion, and Mason treats it exactly like a shift where everything is going wrong but you still have to close the register.

I also really appreciated how the book handles sobriety. Both Mason and Julia are alcoholics, though Mason has three years under her belt and Julia is counting her days in single digits. The author does not treat this as a melodramatic tragedy. It is just a practical reality they have to manage, like checking a schedule or doing inventory. Mason drags Julia to meetings because that is the rule. When Julia is complaining and refusing to go, Mason tells her that is exactly when she needs to go the most. It feels like real work, maintaining that discipline when everything else is falling apart. There is no glamorous gloss put on it. They do not talk about their feelings in flowery language. They just drink bad coffee in church basements and focus on getting through the next twenty four hours without picking up a drink.

But the actual hero of the novel is Claudia, Julia's housekeeper. Claudia is the person holding the entire chaotic household together. She is completely unfazed by Hollywood royalty, murder investigations, or police showing up at the door. She communicates her approval or displeasure entirely through baked goods. When a stressed out college kid shows up at the gate having driven all night, she feeds him scrambled eggs and bacon before she even lets him explain why he is there. Claudia knows that nothing gets solved on an empty stomach. She understands the labor required to keep rich people alive and comfortable, and she does not take any garbage from anyone. When Julia demands that she remodel a guesthouse overnight, Claudia just flatly refuses. I would read an entire book just about Claudia managing the grocery budget and silently judging Julia's life choices.

The investigation involves a lot of driving around Los Angeles, which gave me anxiety just reading about it. The contrast between Mason's daily reality and the vehicles Julia owns is absurd. Julia has a garage full of pristine vintage cars maintained by a guy from a museum. Mason ends up driving a 1965 Shelby Cobra, a classic Rolls Royce Phantom, and a Porsche Speedster simply because she is the assistant and Julia refuses to drive. The casual assumption of wealth is staggering. At one point, Julia offers to pay for Mason to get her private investigator license because she thinks it would be a useful business expense. It is a level of financial security that feels like science fiction to me, but the author uses Mason's grounded perspective to keep it from becoming alienating.

The suspect pool is a collection of Hollywood stereotypes that normally make me want to throw a book across the room. There is the slick studio executive who cares only about streaming rights, the beautiful but apparently vacuous young actress with a meticulously calculated ten year career plan, and the frustrated director trying to get his project off the ground. But the author manages to make them all surprisingly human. The young actress, Jade Solomon, turns out to be weirdly endearing. She quotes Jane Austen because she is reading a list of the hundred greatest novels, and unexpectedly steps in to film an attacker on her phone to save Mason in an alley. It is a good reminder that people who seem ridiculous from the outside often have their own specific kind of competence.

I was a little less convinced by the romantic subplot. Archie is a junior talent agent who is also a lawyer, and he gets drafted into helping them because his boss had a heart attack. He is over six feet tall, unbelievably handsome, wears expensive tailored charcoal suits with vintage high top sneakers, and is endlessly patient with Mason's abrasive attitude. He is basically a fantasy boyfriend constructed from a checklist of desirable traits. When Mason refuses to enter a bar during a foot chase because she knows it might threaten her sobriety, Archie just accepts it instantly and goes in himself. It is nice, but it feels a little too perfect. He never loses his temper and he always has the right legal information. I did not hate him, but I never entirely believed he was a real person holding down a stressful job.

The climax of the book brings all these workplace tensions to a boiling point. The killer traps Julia and Jade in the office and sets the mansion on fire. Mason arrives just in time and has to break through a basement window and navigate a burning hallway to find them. The physical toll of the job is front and center. Mason gets beaten up in a street fight earlier in the book, suffers a dislocated jaw that makes it painful to eat solid food, and then has to run into a burning building for an employer who routinely insults her clothes. It is an extreme version of what it feels like to be expected to give everything to a job that only pays you by the hour, and Mason handles it by just putting her head down.

The reveal of the killer is what ultimately made the story work for me. It turns out to be Helen Eckenridge, Tony's ex wife. Her motive is entirely rooted in professional frustration and stolen labor. She is a talented writer and director who spent decades watching less competent men get opportunities while Tony kept promising her a chance and then giving her projects to other people. The final straw is when Tony decides to leave the studio to his young male assistant and give the directing job for her passion project to a younger male director. Helen does not snap because of a romantic betrayal. She snaps because she realizes she is never going to get credit or compensation for the work she has actually done.

That motive grounds the entire ridiculous Hollywood murder mystery in a very recognizable workplace grievance. I have watched people get promoted because they knew how to play the game while the people actually doing the heavy lifting got ignored. Helen is a murderer who set a house on fire and shot a man in the back of the head, so obviously she is not the hero, but I completely understood her rage. She was tired of being told to wait her turn by a system designed to ensure her turn never came. Choosing stolen professional credit as the catalyst for murder shows a deep understanding of how soul crushing it is to have your labor devalued year after year. It makes the final confrontation in the burning house feel earned rather than just dramatic.

The writing itself is sharp and largely free of the decorative nonsense that usually pads out mysteries. The dialogue moves quickly, and the humor comes from the friction between the characters rather than forced jokes. When Julia is complaining about having to go to a meeting, or Mason is negotiating with a snobby country club manager over a stolen golf cart, the exchanges feel authentic. The author understands that people under extreme stress do not give long, eloquent speeches. They snap at each other, they get hungry, they complain about their feet hurting, and they eventually figure it out. The pacing keeps the story moving without getting bogged down in unnecessary exposition about the movie business, focusing instead on the practical logistics of clearing Julia's name.

I finished the book in three days, which is fast for me considering my work and class schedule. It won me over because it never forgets that even when you are solving a murder in a multimillion dollar mansion, somebody still has to scrub the floors, make the coffee, and pay the rent. Mason is a great character because she knows exactly what her labor is worth and refuses to apologize for demanding to be treated with dignity. I would definitely recommend it, especially if you have ever had to explain a basic concept to a boss who makes ten times your salary and still cannot manage to read an email. It is a solid mystery that actually respects the people working behind the scenes.

The book moves in very short chapters, most of them two or three pages, and almost every one ends on a small joke or a small jolt, a body in a pool, a car chase, a punch line about cookies. For the first ten chapters I thought this was simply the shape of the thing, the way a delivery run is broken into stops. Fine. I can read a book built like that. I read invoices for a living.

By chapter fifteen or so I understood the shape was not going to change. Every chapter is a stop, and at every stop somebody new gets introduced, given a nickname, a designer label, sometimes a whole biography in one paragraph, and then the truck keeps moving before you have any chance to check whether the load matches the paperwork. A cat burglar quoting feminist theory. A turtle-shaped gossip columnist who drinks his coffee with scotch in front of two women trying to stay sober. A billionaire actress who reads Jane Austen between casting calls. Each one is amusing for about a page. None of them add up to a route sheet I could follow.

Here is the thing that actually started to bother me, more than the jokes. Tony Eckenridge dies in the first chapter, and by the middle of the book his will has already been read twice, changed once, hidden in a hollowed-out prop book, and fought over by five people, and at no point does anyone in this story behave like money and ownership are real. I have sat through will readings in my own family, small ones, an apartment and some savings, and even those took weeks of paperwork and produced actual arguments about actual numbers. Here a man leaves a studio, a movie franchise and a burlesque club's worth of shares to near strangers over lunch, on a whim, and everyone just shrugs and moves on to the next scene. Who signed it. Who witnessed it. Nobody in this book seems to care, and I found I could not stop caring on their behalf.

That bothered me more than it should have, maybe.

Then there is the violence, which has no weight at all. Julia gets shoved to the ground outside a club and calls it a bad photo angle. Mason gets a knife pulled on her neck, breaks free, gets knocked out on the sidewalk, and the very next scene is her drugged in a hospital bed making jokes about a doctor's marriage while everyone laughs. A house full of tropical fish gets smashed and the loss of the fish gets more page time than the man who nearly died next to the tank. I do not need a mystery to be grim. I need it to know the difference between a joke and a consequence, and this book kept mixing the two into the same box and taping it shut without a label.

I have moved a lot of boxes in my life. A box with no label gets opened three times before anyone finds what's inside, and every one of those openings costs somebody time. That is roughly how this book reads to me.

The recovery material is the part I expected to respect, and in small pieces I did. The detail about a sponsor not asking questions unless the other person opens the door first, that was true to something real, I could tell the author knew a room like that. But then every serious moment gets undercut inside the same paragraph. A man tosses a bottle of scotch into his coffee two feet from a woman five days sober, and it's played as a punch line about Twinkies. A recovering gambler explains blackout memory loss like a lecture, then somebody makes a joke about band names, every single time, without exception, until the rhythm itself became the problem. I don't mind a book being funny about a hard subject. I mind a book that cannot let a hard subject sit still for even one page before it reaches for the next laugh.

The moment I actually put it down was the hospital scene after the knife attack. Mason has just nearly had her throat opened on a downtown sidewalk. Two pages later she is high on painkillers, trying to set up her own boss with the doctor, and the actress who saved her life is getting a sick bag signed like a fan autograph. I sat there and thought, nobody in this room is going to remember tomorrow that this almost mattered. And I realized I didn't believe I would either, twenty chapters further in. Every attack up to that point had produced no lasting damage, no real fear, no change in anyone's plan for more than a scene. I stopped expecting the next one to land differently.

So I stopped. Chapter twenty-four, a little past the halfway mark. Not because of one single insult to my patience, though the hospital scene is the one I remember, but because by then I had watched the same trick work four or five times: raise something that should hurt, joke it away within a page, add three more characters, keep the truck moving. I don't know how the studio ends up being run. I don't know who is behind the second attack, or whether the film canister Julia is carrying around actually matters, or what happens with the girl at the strip club. I am not going to pretend I do, and I am not going to guess.

What I can tell you is what I read. Twenty four chapters of quick, competent, genuinely funny dialogue sitting on top of a plot that treats money, danger and other people's grief as set dressing for the next quip. Mason herself I liked well enough, she notices things, she asks the kind of blunt question I'd ask on a receiving dock. Julia Mann is sharp and occasionally very good value. But a good line every few pages is not the same as a book that respects its own stakes, and after twenty four chapters of watching nobody get held to account for anything, I had no reason left to believe the next twenty would be different. I put it down and went and checked whether the pallets had actually been counted right that morning. They had. Small comfort, but at least somebody had signed for it.

I started One Death at a Time on a Wednesday night at the kitchen table, after I had already closed the work laptop. I had about forty minutes and a cold espresso. I read the prologue and the first two chapters that night. Thursday I moved to the sofa and lasted a little over an hour. Friday I picked it up again after eleven. I was already tired of being sold a joke every time a fact appeared. I stopped at the end of chapter 8, after the funeral for the man who had been floating in Julia Mann's pool. That is the scope of this review. I did not read past that funeral. I cannot tell you whether the investigation ever becomes a real process. I can tell you why I did not give it a fourth night.

The book opens with Julia drunk on a pool deck, a man in a dark suit in the water, a rifle she throws away, and a run into the night. Then Jim sets pamphlets on fire in a recovery meeting and Natasha Mason stamps them out because she has the right boots. Julia arrives with a court card and a highlight reel: a 0.35 Breathalyzer, the 405, a cop punched in the throat, a body she fled. The group treats it like a high score. Mason volunteers as interim sponsor before the night is over. No fact was allowed to remain a fact. The fire, the number, the punch, and the corpse were comic business. I kept waiting for someone to own the next step. The book kept scoring the room instead.

The next morning Mason reaches a glass house with yellow tape around an infinity pool. Claudia blocks the door. Julia hires Mason on the spot because the last helper quit after being told to go back to Wisconsin. Mason says yes in one sentence. She is now sponsor, employee, and investigator before anyone has written a timeline. That is not how a person takes a job. I do this kind of work for a living: the boring screens, who is allowed to do what. Stacking those three roles is a permissions error. You get a mess and then you call the mess chemistry. Tony was shot, dead before he hit the water, around ten at night. Mason drives a 1965 Shelby Cobra because Julia will not sit in her car. They charge Julia because her prints are on the rifle and nobody else's. She says she might have picked the gun up while blacked out. That is the first sentence that behaves like evidence. The scene still needs an exit line.

I do not need a mystery to be grim. I need a ledger: who had a window, who left, who is lying in a way that would still be true on Monday. This book would rather catalog vintage clothes and a cursed film called The Codex. Julia's lawyer is also her agent. Larry had a heart attack, so Archie Jacobson arrives in Star Trek socks. They argue about a silver catsuit. Nobody builds the list of people who could have been on that deck. Ben Sharp faints in the hall. His sister is in hospital on a homicide charge. Julia takes that case too, because of a prison promise. You cannot run two homicide defenses on day five of sobriety because someone with a new title is available. The book thinks the refusal to prioritize is charm.

Chapter 8 is a funeral that works like a reception with better lighting. People line up to ask Julia about a remake. An actress wears a tiny bird on her hat. Mason runs through hungry, angry, lonely, tired like a checklist. Julia stays to watch for guilt in a room of professional liars. That is not a method. That is the premise saying itself again. By then I had also sat through a yellow cape, a Rolls-Royce, and a designer who would not let Julia sit because the pleats would die. The stretch I read puts a joke or a costume at the end of a scene so you do not notice the case did not move. I cannot tell you who killed Tony. I did not get that far. I no longer believed the next chapter would start the job.

The recovery material is decoration. Mason recites slogans. Julia says she already had ten years and does not need a child telling her about one day at a time. After the funeral she refuses a meeting and tells Mason to go away. Mason is rude about it. That was the most believable exchange I got, and it still produced no consequence except another plan for morning. Julia is cutting to assistants, to Mason, to the press. The book presents the cutting as style. I experienced it as a stakeholder who treats every question as a scene.

I stopped because the failure repeated. A real question would surface, then the book would change cars. Why was Tony at the house. Why accept a second client before the first has a timeline. I gave it three evenings. I had seen enough of the method. I did not want another hour of it. I cannot judge the ending or the killer. I can judge the prologue through chapter 8. They are busy, pleased with themselves, and allergic to the next useful action. I put the book down after the funeral and left it there.

There is a moment right near the end of this novel where an armed murderer has three women trapped in a burning house. I should state clearly right now that I am going to discuss the ending, the twists, and exactly who the killer is, so if you prefer to read your mysteries without knowing the outcome, consider yourself warned. The killer is standing in a smoke-filled room, pointing a gun at her hostages and delivering a highly detailed monologue about her thwarted career ambitions and the systemic sexism of the film industry. The smoke is thickening. The tension is supposed to be at its absolute peak. And how does our heroine resolve this life-or-death standoff? She sits up and throws a television remote control directly at the killer's nose. The killer drops the gun, gets tackled to the floor, and everyone eventually goes outside to eat breakfast burritos.

That single action encapsulates the entire frequency on which Abbi Waxman operates in One Death at a Time. It is a book that desperately wants to be a slick television script, prioritising witty visual gags and rapid-fire dialogue over any sort of grounded reality. I will happily admit that the novel caught my attention in the first thirty pages. It opens with Julia Mann, a former Oscar-winning actress, sitting by her infinity pool next to the floating corpse of a studio executive named Tony Eckenridge. She is incredibly drunk, throws a rifle into the canyon, and flees in a sports car. We then cut to Natasha Mason, a twenty-five-year-old gig worker with three years of sobriety, attending a recovery meeting where another attendee is currently setting pamphlets on fire. Julia walks into this meeting to get her court card signed after blowing a 0.35 and getting into a police chase. Mason spontaneously volunteers to be her interim sponsor.

I like a practical setup, and the idea of a chaotic older actress and a blunt, sober younger woman forced together by circumstance has obvious potential. Waxman sets up a decent logistical problem right from the start. Julia needs to figure out who dumped a body in her pool so she does not go back to prison, having already served fifteen years for supposedly killing her husband Jonathan decades earlier. Mason needs the money Julia offers her to act as a personal assistant and private investigator. For the first few chapters, I genuinely thought I was reading a sharp, slightly cynical mystery about navigating the wealthy wreckage of Los Angeles. The pacing is fast, the initial stakes are clear, and the collision of their two worlds feels like a solid foundation for a story.

But the goodwill generated by that opening burns off quickly. The primary problem, and the one that eventually made the reading experience feel like a chore, is that nobody in this book speaks like an actual human being. Every single character, regardless of age, background, or profession, possesses the exact same voice. They communicate almost entirely in snappy comebacks, sarcastic deflections, and perfectly timed punchlines. If you ask a question in this universe, you do not get a straight answer. You get a quip. When Mason first goes to Julia's house, she is greeted by Claudia, the housekeeper. Rather than simply saying hello, Claudia tells Mason she doubts she is a friend, asks if she needs to run her mouth some more, and delivers a masterclass in aggressive apathy before letting her inside.

In my line of work managing commercial finance accounts, if you spend your entire day trying to prove you are the smartest person in the room with relentless sarcasm, you do not solve problems. You just create endless administrative friction. Reading One Death at a Time is like sitting in a meeting with five people who are all auditioning for a comedy broadcast. The banter never stops, and it is completely exhausting. There is no emotional grounding because nobody ever drops the performance. Even when a character is discussing a dead relative, or confessing to a brutal crime, the dialogue remains polished to a high, unnatural gloss. Everyone is simply waiting for their turn to deliver the best line.

This lack of realism extends deeply into the characterisation. Take Natasha Mason, for example. We are told she is a tough gig worker who used to get into street brawls in Berkeley before getting sober. Her primary personality traits seem to be eating massive amounts of sugary food without gaining weight, threatening to physically fight people who annoy her, and delivering recovery slogans as conversational weapons. She operates less like a real twenty-five-year-old trying to navigate the economy and more like a screenwriter's idea of a sassy sidekick. She leaves her three-legged cat Phil alone in her apartment to move into a stranger's house and start investigating murders with almost zero hesitation, treating the entire enterprise like a fun distraction rather than a highly dangerous disruption of her life.

Then there is Julia Mann herself. She is supposed to be in her sixties, but she operates like a glamorous comic-book superhero. She wears vintage Yves Saint Laurent couture to sit around the house, drives a classic Lamborghini Miura at nearly a hundred miles an hour barefoot while wearing her pyjamas, and is apparently irresistible to nearly everyone she meets. The novel expects us to take her struggle with alcoholism seriously, but her relapses and recovery are treated with the same breezy lightness as her wardrobe choices. She treats the police like irritating delivery drivers and routinely ignores basic legal boundaries, yet the narrative constantly rewards her for her arrogance.

The supporting cast exists purely to facilitate the banter and handle the logistics that the main characters cannot be bothered with. Will Maier lives in one of the guesthouses and functions as a human search engine. He knows the specific migration patterns of California raptors and the exact history of the Springfield M1903 rifle used to kill Tony. He is positioned as an autistic researcher who literally gives PowerPoint presentations in the living room to explain the suspects and clues to the rest of the cast. Archie Jacobson is a handsome lawyer who seems to have no actual legal responsibilities other than following Mason around, carrying baked goods, and providing mild romantic tension. In the real world, a lawyer actively participating in tampering with evidence and withholding information from the police would be disbarred, but here it is just treated as a quirky bonding exercise.

Because they never stop performing, they never actually investigate anything in a way that feels methodical or earned. They just drive around in Julia's collection of classic cars, barging into places and demanding answers until someone confesses. They wander into Galliano's, a historic burlesque club run by Maggie Galliano, where her business partner Danny Agosti literally tries to pay them to stop investigating to protect his family's reputation. They visit an animal shelter to check an alibi. They drive up to Solvang to harass a director named Jason Reed on the set of a car commercial. None of it feels like actual detective work. It just feels like a series of excuses for the characters to change outfits and deliver more sarcasm in new locations.

The absurdity peaks during a trip to Palm Springs. Julia and Mason go to investigate the death of an old actor named Jack Simon, who recently died in an apparent suicide on a golf course. They also visit a local dive bar called Eddie's, where they question the bartender and one of Jack's ex-girlfriends over vodka tonics and extra lime slices. They break into his highly exclusive gated country club by having Julia pretend over the intercom to be an elderly member named Mrs. Gregory. They sit at the bar, get a private tour of Jack Simon's house from a club manager named Robert, and discover Jack's secret letters in a locked desk drawer. Later that same day, Julia decides they need to go back, so she steals a golf cart right in front of the elderly couple who had booked it, resulting in a low-speed chase across the fairways.

This leads them to confront Robert, the country club manager, while he is sitting naked in a hot tub drinking tequila. Robert confesses that he was actually Jack's partner of thirty years, and that he accidentally shot Jack during an argument about Jack moving back to Hollywood. And then Robert picks up a gun from the edge of the tub and blows his own brains out right in front of them. Do Julia and Mason sit down with the police and explain what they have just heard? No. Julia decides they should just sneak away across the golf course because the police will assume Robert killed himself out of grief, which is technically true enough for her liking. A man shoots himself two feet away from them, and Julia's primary reaction is to complain about how the whole thing is very sad and she needs a drink.

The sheer callousness of that scene, masked as Hollywood cool, completely severed any remaining trust I had in the narrative. The book wants to have the gritty stakes of a murder mystery but refuses to let its characters react with anything approaching normal human empathy. There is a secondary plot running alongside this involving a young woman named Becky Sharp, who is accused of murdering her girlfriend Sam at the burlesque club. Julia takes Becky into her home to protect her. Becky's grandmother, Anna Jones, eventually shows up from Oregon to yell about sin and damnation. It turns out the grandmother went to the club on the night of the murder, yelled at them, and left, leaving Becky passed out behind the bar. Someone else entirely came in and killed Sam.

That someone else is Helen Eckenridge. This brings us back to the burning house and the television remote. The grand reveal is that Helen, Tony's separated wife and the writer of the original movie The Codex, is the mastermind behind almost everything. The climax begins at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery during a Cinespia outdoor screening of The Codex. Helen fires blank rounds into the air to cause a massive panic among the crowd, using the distraction to kidnap Julia and Jade Solomon. She takes them back to Julia's house, locks them in the office, and sets the living room wing on fire.

When Mason finally breaks into the burning house and finds them, Helen takes the time to explain all of her logistics while the flames consume the building. She explains that she killed Tony because he was going to leave the studio to his assistant Cody Malone and give the directing job for the remake to Jason Reed. She killed Sam the burlesque performer because Sam had accidentally witnessed Tony hiding his new will inside a hollow book in Maggie's office. She broke into the studio and smashed thousands of dollars worth of tropical fish tanks. She hired actors to attack Julia on the street to generate publicity and build up the legend of the Codex Curse.

Helen complains bitterly about movie jail, about executives demanding inappropriate favours, and about how much harder it is for female directors to get a second chance in the industry. It is a genuine issue in the real world, but placing a lecture on workplace inequality in the mouth of a woman who just shot her husband in the back of the head, smothered an innocent twenty-seven-year-old woman, and is currently trying to burn three people alive makes the entire argument feel incredibly cheap. It trivialises the very point the author seems to want to make.

Which leads to the thrown remote. The fire brigade bursts in. The police arrest Helen without further incident. The very next morning, the main cast is sitting around the swimming pool eating breakfast burritos and Tater Tots supplied by Claudia, who seems to exist primarily to bake extraordinary quantities of cheese straws, pseudo-Twinkies, and chocolate mousse. They literally sit next to the ashes of a destroyed home, making lighthearted jokes and wrapping up the loose plot threads. Tony's posthumous letter reveals that Mikey Agosti likely arranged the death of Julia's husband decades ago, giving her the closure she supposedly needed. Julia offers Mason a permanent job and agrees to pay for her private investigator license, and Mason happily accepts. There are absolutely no lasting consequences for anyone we are supposed to like.

Waxman clearly intends this to be a breezy, entertaining romp through the eccentricities of Los Angeles. For a reader who enjoys constant banter, wealthy people doing whatever they want without facing reality, and mysteries where the clues are handed out via PowerPoint presentations in a mansion, this might be a perfectly fun way to spend a weekend. But for me, it was just an exercise in patience. It is a book where nothing feels grounded, nobody acts like an adult, and serious things like addiction, suicide, and murder are just setups for the next witty comeback. I wanted a mystery with some actual stakes and some believable human behaviour. What I got was a television script that forgot to include the commercial breaks.

Julia Mann stands outside the charred remains of her living room, wearing a pale pink coat and waving a letter written by a murdered man. She is screaming that she is going to drive to the cemetery, dig him up, and stomp on his decomposing body. Mason, her twenty-five-year-old assistant, sighs and turns toward the guesthouse to fetch her boots and a shovel. That is how Abbi Waxman finishes this book. It is a ridiculous, highly satisfying scene that perfectly captures the working dynamic of the women involved. Before I work backward to explain how they ended up in that driveway, you should know this review discusses the ending, identifies the killer, and details the late twists.

Just a few chapters prior to that final scene, Mason and Julia were trapped in that burning house. Helen Eckenridge, a frustrated writer and director, had a gun pointed at Julia and a young actress named Jade. Helen set the fire because she had finally run out of patience with a film industry that kept passing her over for less competent men. Tony Eckenridge, her estranged husband and the head of a major studio, had promised her the director's chair for a remake of her classic movie. Then he changed his mind and decided to give the project to a younger male director.

As a human resources director, I spend a large part of my week listening to employees who feel their contributions have been ignored. I usually recommend a structured conversation with their manager or a review of their job description. Helen opted to shoot the studio head in the back of the neck with a vintage rifle and torch a mid-century cantilevered house. It is a severe escalation of a personnel issue. However, Waxman writes Helen's breakdown so clearly that I completely understood the administrative frustration behind it.

Helen's motive is entirely professional and deeply embedded in workplace inequity. She watched Tony hand opportunities to younger men while she sat in what the industry calls movie jail. Waxman builds this workplace resentment perfectly. When Mason interviews Helen earlier in the book, Helen is politely turning away handsome young actors while maintaining an immaculately organized Silver Lake courtyard. The contrast between her calm, controlling exterior and the raging professional disappointment underneath is excellent character work. She is a woman who did everything correctly and still lost her career.

But Helen is the antagonist. The actual center of the novel is the employer and employee relationship between Julia Mann and Natasha Mason. Julia is an Oscar-winning actress who went to prison for fifteen years for her husband's murder, got sober, earned a law degree, and now investigates cases for people the system ignored. She is prickly, demanding, and highly competent. She expects everyone around her to meet her standards, and she does not care if she hurts their feelings in the process.

Mason is twenty-five, a recovering alcoholic with three years of sobriety, and largely directionless. They meet at a recovery meeting where a man sets fire to some pamphlets in a trash can. Mason stomps out the fire with her boots. Julia watches the chaos with extreme sufferance, wearing a vintage dress and white boots, refusing to participate in the group sharing. Mason decides to become Julia's interim sponsor. Julia decides to hire Mason as her assistant.

What follows is an intensive study in workplace boundaries, mostly because neither woman respects them. I spend a lot of time telling managers that they cannot treat their direct reports as therapists or fixers. Julia essentially ignores all standard management protocols. She drags Mason into a murder investigation simply because Tony Eckenridge died in her swimming pool and she knows the police will eventually try to blame her.

The dynamic between them works because Waxman grounds it in the practical realities of their shared alcoholism. They attend meetings together. They bicker over donuts and coffee. When Mason gets beaten up by a masked attacker in downtown Los Angeles, Julia is angry but also protective, moving Mason into her guesthouse. The care is entirely practical. Julia provides room, board, and a salary, and in return, Mason provides absolute loyalty and a willingness to break minor laws.

There is a scene early on where Mason drives Julia in a 1965 Shelby Cobra. Mason assumes they are just going to the police station for questioning. Instead, Julia turns a routine police interview into a press conference on the steps. She wears an elegant yellow cape and manipulates the paparazzi with decades of practiced skill. Mason realizes she is working for a master manipulator. But she also realizes Julia is using that manipulation to stay out of prison.

Julia knows the Los Angeles police are lazy. She knows they will simply arrest the most convenient suspect with a record. She understands that the justice system is a machine designed to process bodies, not to find the truth. She was chewed up by that machine once before, losing fifteen years of her life because she was a convenient scapegoat for a careless police department. She refuses to let it happen again, so her drive to solve the murder is pure self-preservation. She employs a team of misfits to help her, and they operate with more efficiency than most corporate departments I have audited.

The investigative team is rounded out by Will Maier, Julia's legal assistant. Will is sober, obsessed with California raptors, and has a memory that functions like a filing cabinet. When Julia needs to know the financial status of a rival director or the history of a burlesque club, Will simply produces a presentation. He calculates the exact probability of a scorpion killing a small dog. He notices that a suicide victim in a sand trap has no footprints leading to the body.

Waxman writes Will with dignity, never making him the punchline of a joke. His competence is the engine that drives the plot forward. Then there is Claudia, the housekeeper. Claudia also met Julia in prison. She manages the house, ignores Julia's tantrums, and produces an endless stream of baked goods. At one point, she feeds Mason tiny potato latkes with sour cream after Mason has her face smashed in. I appreciate anyone who understands that logistical support is a vital component of any operation.

The actual investigation moves through Hollywood with the efficiency of a good audit. They visit a historic burlesque club where another murder has taken place. They interview a tiny cat burglar named Larissa who treats scaling buildings as a fitness exercise. Every interview uncovers a new layer of Hollywood's transactional relationships. Waxman captures the transactional nature of the city beautifully. Everyone is networking, and everyone is keeping score.

Even the handsome young man who just inherited a third of a major studio, Cody Malone, got his start by delivering a sandwich and having the correct opinion about director David Lean. Tony Eckenridge had a habit of making promises to everyone. He promised a young assistant a share of the studio. He promised Helen a directing role. He promised an actor named Jack Simon a monthly stipend disguised as scale pay to keep him quiet. As an HR professional, I can tell you that making promises you cannot keep is the fastest way to destroy employee morale. In Tony's case, it got him killed. Managing one person with that level of chaotic authority is difficult, and cleaning up their estate after they are murdered is nearly impossible.

The book is full of sharp observations about the entertainment industry. A director named Jason Reed wants to cast a famous actress in a movie about a dog involved in the American War of Independence. It sounds absurd, but Will calmly points out that a movie about talking Chihuahuas grossed over a hundred million dollars. The logic is impenetrable and entirely accurate. The industry runs on money, not art.

I also appreciated the character of Jade Solomon. She is a beautiful, highly paid actress with a ten-year career plan who quotes Jane Austen and reads children's books. When Mason is attacked in an alley, it is Jade who saves her by screaming that she is recording the assault on her new phone. She is shallow but surprisingly brave. She understands her value in the marketplace and protects it fiercely.

The pacing of the novel matches the erratic rhythm of a real investigation. There are long stretches of waiting, followed by sudden bursts of violence. Mason has to sit by a catering table in Solvang for four hours just to get ten minutes with a director. That is exactly how fact-finding works in practice. You wait for people to be ready to speak. You sit in traffic. You review bank statements to track hidden payments to former actors. You verify timelines by checking volunteer logs at the local animal shelter. The glamour of the Hollywood setting never disguises the fundamental tedium of a thorough investigation, which is exactly how it should be written.

There is a fantastic car chase that breaks up the procedural elements. Julia and Mason chase a suspect in a Lamborghini Miura up a winding canyon road at ninety miles an hour. Julia drives barefoot, completely relaxed, while Mason holds on for her life. It is a cinematic sequence that highlights Julia's utter lack of fear. She spent fifteen years in prison. A car crash does not frighten her.

They also travel to Palm Springs to investigate the death of Jack Simon, an old actor friend of Julia's. The Palm Springs chapters are a masterclass in extracting information from reluctant witnesses. Julia fakes her way into an exclusive country club by pretending to be a wealthy prospective member. She orders drinks, charms the manager, and secures a private tour of the crime scene. It is a beautiful demonstration of social engineering.

Watching Mason grow into her job is deeply satisfying. She starts the book impulsive and angry. She ends it capable of piecing together a vital clue about a hollow book used to hide a will. She stops reacting to every insult and starts listening for the hesitation in a witness's voice. She learns to reconstruct an event before interpreting it, which is the foundational skill of any good investigator or human resources professional. By the end of the novel, Julia offers to pay for her private investigator license.

That is a solid retention strategy. You find an employee who anticipates your needs, you pay for their training, and you bind them to your organization. I would flag the dual relationship of employer and sponsor as a massive liability in any normal workplace. But in the context of this specific fictional household, it functions perfectly. They keep each other sober, and they keep each other alive.

The climax at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery is a logistical nightmare. A sniper starts shooting blanks into the air during a crowded outdoor movie screening. The resulting stampede is terrifying and entirely plausible. Waxman tracks the movement of the characters through the chaos using a location-sharing app on their phones. It is a very modern, practical solution to a classic mystery setup.

When Helen eventually corners them in the burning house, she explains her entire motive. She is angry about the lack of opportunities for female directors. She is angry about the harassment she endured early in her career. She is angry that Tony stole her script and gave it to someone else. Her monologue is a blistering indictment of the studio system. It does not excuse her actions, but it provides necessary context.

For this reviewer, this book ultimately became a book about competent women refusing to be sidelined. Julia refuses to go back to prison. Helen refuses to be denied her directing credit, even if she has to commit murder to secure it. Mason refuses to remain a gig economy drifter. Even Maggie Galliano, the owner of the burlesque club, runs her business with an iron fist and refuses to be intimidated by the men around her.

The men in the novel are either dead, overly emotional, or acting as assistants. The women are the ones making the decisions and dealing with the consequences. It is a refreshing reversal of the usual power dynamics in detective fiction. The female characters are allowed to be difficult, ambitious, and morally compromised.

It is an incredibly fun, sharply written novel. The procedural elements of the mystery are solid, but the character work is what kept me reading. When Mason finally agrees to stay and work for Julia, despite the car chases and the violence, it feels like the correct career move. I look forward to seeing what they investigate next.

Call it a service call that never gets to the diagnosis. I'm going to spoil the ending and the killer, because the ending is where One Death at a Time finally tells you what it thinks it is. I read the whole thing, and I came out the other side less interested in who did it than in why a murder mystery keeps apologizing for being a murder mystery. I can't recommend it.

The setup has legitimate pull. Julia Mann is an Oscar winning actress who went to prison for killing her husband, became a lawyer, and now investigates cases for people the system forgets. She wakes up after a blackout to find Tony Eckenridge, an old enemy and sometime lover, floating in her pool. Natasha Mason, her new sponsor and assistant, is young, broke, sober and quick to swing. That is a workable engine. The book treats it like a comedy sketch with a body count, though. Every scene has to be bright and fast and quippy, and the quips keep landing on top of the actual story. It also does not trust the reader to hold a plot. It repeats information, explains jokes, and then explains the explanations.

The investigation runs on convenience. A film canister Tony brought the night he died turns up under a car seat. A hidden will is in a hollow book, the same prop Julia used in The Codex, and Mason finds it after banging her head on a locker door. Julia's memory of the night comes back only after a knock on the head. The killer explains everything in a burning house. Same problem, different box. The book never lets a clue arrive because someone did the work; it lets the clue arrive because the plot needs a reason to move. The murder weapon is a rifle with Julia's prints on it, and no one ever seriously asks how an Oscar winning lawyer who claims she does not own a gun got her prints on a rifle from a prop collection. The question is just left there.

Consider the will. Tony wrote a new one the day before he died, leaving the studio to Christine and Cody and giving Maggie back her ten percent of the club. He hid it in a hollow book in Maggie's office. Sam and Becky witnessed it without reading it. Helen does not know it exists until Julia announces a different version at Cinespia. The entire resolution depends on a dying man choosing the most theatrical hiding place available and on Mason recognizing a prop from a movie she had barely seen. That is not detection. That is the author moving chess pieces. The same goes for the old film Tony brought. It is supposed to explain why he stayed silent about Jonathan's death, but the book never resolves what actually happened to Jonathan. It is backstory with a prop.

Consider the killer. Helen Eckenridge is Tony's wife and the original screenwriter of The Codex. She won an Oscar for a script that was mostly rewritten by Julia's husband, and she spent decades being promised directing work that never came. When Tony told her he was taking the remake rights back, she killed him with a vintage rifle from his own collection. She also killed Sam, because Sam witnessed the new will and tried to use it. She attacked Cody, threw tropical fish around his office, hired actors to attack Julia and Maggie, fired blanks at Cinespia, and set Julia's house on fire. Her motive is real and sad. The way it is exposed is not. She tells the whole story in a long monologue while holding a gun, and the book expects you to accept that a careful killer would suddenly turn into a Bond villain. It also expects you to believe a woman who planned a murder around a media curse would forget to check whether her victims were still breathing. That is not a twist. That is a convenience.

The tone is the larger problem. The prologue has Julia throwing her shoes into the pool and saying Whoopsy while a man's body bobs nearby. The dead man's tie hangs down like a long stemmed tulip. The book wants the body to be funny and shocking at the same time, but the jokes flatten every scene. A woman is smothered with a pillow, and the reaction is a joke about Associated Fish. A man shoots himself in front of two people, and the scene moves on to the next wisecrack. Grief, fear and pain are all treated as material. After a while I stopped believing any of it mattered. The book is afraid of silence. If a moment threatens to become real, someone makes a joke about cookies or a cat.

The characters are not people, they are features. Mason is the best company in the book, and she is still a list of quirks: too much energy, poor impulse control, a My Little Pony T-shirt, a three legged cat. Julia is a collection of vintage couture and one-liners. Will is a walking encyclopedia who recites facts about raptors and guns. Claudia is a magic cookie dispenser. Jade Solomon is the beautiful actress with a ten-year plan and no interior life. The only one who feels like a human being is Becky, and she spends most of the book hiding. The rest are introduced with a job description and a costume, and they never grow beyond it.

The two cases are welded together by coincidence. Becky's mother was Julia's friend in prison, so Julia takes the case. Becky's grandmother happened to be at the club the night Sam died, but left before the murder. A cat burglar happened to be on the roof and saw a man enter and leave, but cannot describe him. Helen happened to be an ex-stuntwoman who could shoot and start fires. Every connection is a coincidence, and every coincidence is treated as a clue. It is not. It is the author clearing a path. The police are either useless or suddenly sharp, depending on what the scene needs, and no one ever checks the obvious trail until Julia's team does. The cat burglar is named Larissa and she belongs in a different novel, one that has room for a character who exists for her own reasons. Here she exists to hand the plot a piece of information and leave.

The legal stakes vanish as soon as they are introduced. Julia is arrested, released, and then the case just continues. No one pushes back on her investigating while out on bail. The police warn her once and then disappear. Becky is arraigned, but the case is forgotten until Helen confesses. For a book about a lawyer and an accused woman, it has almost no interest in the law. It is not a legal thriller; it is a scavenger hunt where the next clue is always in the next room. The sobriety material is the only part with a pulse. Mason counting the seconds around a bottle of scotch, Julia saying she was sober before you were born and drunk last week, the meeting scenes, the fear of relapse. I believed that thread more than I believed the murder plot. But even it is used as texture. Julia's relapse is convenient because it explains why she cannot remember the night. Her memory returns when the plot needs it. The recovery is not allowed to complicate anything; it just gives the characters something to say in the quiet moments.

I finished the book because I wanted to see whether it could talk its way out of the corner. It does, sort of, by having Helen confess in a burning room and Julia throw a remote control at her nose. That is the level of engineering the whole book runs on. It is not a mystery and not quite a comedy. It is a book that keeps interrupting itself, and after a while I stopped caring who did it. I had enough before the fire, and the fire did not change my mind. I can't recommend One Death at a Time to anyone who wants a plot that holds together. The jokes are fine. The diagnosis is missing.

Every book with a wisecracking woman and a corpse on the cover gets shelved next to Richard Osman these days, and that's clearly where the shop expected this one to live too, going by the jacket: bright, knowing, a joke for a title. I picked it up expecting The Thursday Murder Club with better cheekbones, and I want to say straight away, the way I'd warn a friend rather than stick a label on it, that I'm going to talk about the ending and name the killer, because there's no reviewing this one honestly otherwise. Helen Eckenridge did it, all three deaths in one way or another, and if that spoils it for you, come back once you've finished.

So I went in braced for cosy. What I actually got was an office comedy wearing a murder mystery as fancy dress, and that's not a complaint, it's the whole reason I ended up liking it more than I expected to. The book opens in a court-mandated recovery group with a man setting fire to the pamphlets, and the facilitator, Sherri, calmly telling him fire isn't a form of self-expression she can sanction in Group. That's the tone for the next four hundred pages: chaos, but chaos with somebody keeping minutes.

What won me over, properly won me over, was Mason. Not the murder plot round her, which I'll get to, but the fact that her sobriety isn't decoration. The meetings have actual furniture to them, the cross-talk rule gets explained and then immediately broken for comic effect, the tenth step gets used as a running joke that still means something by the end. Julia Mann is glamorous and outrageous and gets all the best lines, but Mason is the one doing the work, and the book seems to know it. I recognised that dynamic. The person doing the actual running of things rarely gets the good lines either.

And here's where the book properly turned a corner for me, because I went in assuming Julia Mann would be exactly the kind of character I find tiresome: rich, untouchable, rules don't apply to her. She is all of that. But Waxman keeps letting other people call it, Mason especially, and the household around her, Claudia the housekeeper and Will the researcher, run like a small, competent office underneath all the theatrics. Claudia feeding everyone while managing four separate crises with a cookie tray is the most accurately observed thing in the book. I've been that person at work more times than I'd like, minus the wedding cookies.

I expected to find the Hollywood satire exhausting, all those agents and studio executives being awful to each other over lunch, and for the first hundred pages I did roll my eyes at it. But it earns its keep eventually, because the whole case turns out to hinge on exactly the kind of unfairness I do recognise, just dressed up in silver catsuits instead of spreadsheets. Helen's confession, once it comes, isn't really about a dead film producer at all. It's about being promised the next project for thirty years running while younger, worse men got handed things she'd have killed for, and by the end of the book, she has. I didn't expect a Hollywood curse plot to land a genuine point about who gets believed as capable and who gets told to wait, but it did, and it stayed with me longer than the catsuit did.

That said, I won't pretend the plotting doesn't get overstuffed. There's Tony's murder, then a second death that turns out to be entirely unrelated and takes a whole detour to Palm Springs to resolve, then a third case involving a stripper, her girlfriend, a bigoted grandmother and a pair of twins, and by the time we're stealing a golf cart from an elderly couple I did start wondering if anyone had actually gone through the file and worked out what belonged where. It's a bit like a desk where every drawer is open at once. Some of it earns its place. Not all of it does. The Jack Simon strand is genuinely moving once it lands, but it's also the kind of thing that would have made a perfectly good book on its own, rather than a subplot competing for attention with a car chase down a canyon at ninety miles an hour.

I also had my doubts about Jade Solomon, the deliberately dim starlet who quotes Jane Austen without noticing she's being clever, because that joke gets made about four times more than it needs to be. But I'll say this for the book: it doesn't let you keep underestimating her either, and by the time she's filming an attacker on her phone and threatening him with better resolution than his lawyer's going to want, I'd come round. That's the pattern of the whole thing, actually. Nearly every character I wrote off in the first fifty pages, I ended up liking by the last fifty. That's not nothing.

The humour is properly funny in places, not just quippy. The label printer becoming shorthand for institutional dysfunction, the ongoing argument about whether there can be two best boys on a film set, Will's compulsive fact dumps landing exactly where they shouldn't, these are the kind of jokes that come from someone who's actually sat in enough meetings to know how they go wrong. I laughed out loud more than once, which for a murder mystery is either a mismatch or a genuine skill, and here it's the second one.

Where it lost me slightly was the ending, not the reveal itself, which I thought was properly earned, but the speed of the wrap-up once Helen's caught. Three deaths, a house fire, a hostage situation and a decades-old cover-up involving organised crime and Julia's dead husband all get tidied into about four pages of exposition on a pool deck the next morning, and I'd have liked a bit more time sitting with what it cost everyone, rather than moving straight to Julia deciding to dig up a corpse over an unrelated grievance about his will. It's a very funny final beat. It isn't quite the weight the rest of the book had built up to.

But here's my honest verdict, and I don't think I'm the obvious reader for this: I went in expecting a slight, silly celebrity mystery and I came out having actually cared what happened to Mason, having laughed properly at the office jokes buried in among the movie stars, and having thought about Helen's speech longer than I expected to think about anything in a book with a silver catsuit on the cover. I'd recommend it, and I'd recommend it particularly to anyone who assumes, like I did, that they already know what kind of book this is going to be from where it's sitting on the shelf. It isn't shelved wrong exactly. It's just doing more than the cover lets on.