There will be blood in 'Oscar Season'

L.A. Times' Mary McNamara writes whodunnit

By PAT SAPERSTEIN

Like many entertainment journalists, L.A. Times reporter Mary McNamara has had to find ways to parse the Oscar race from every conceivable angle for an unending stream of kudos stories. One year, she even camped out at the Four Seasons Hotel for a behind-the-scenes story on serving stars' every whim.

At least all the inside knowledge she couldn't use in her reportage eventually paid dividends -- as juicy fodder for her first novel, "Oscar Season," a mystery about a hotel PR director who unearths a complicated murder plot culminating at the kudos ceremony.

"Hotel people have a strange but clear window onto the entertainment industry that other people don't," McNamara says of the decision to set her book at the (fictional) Pinnacle Hotel.

McNamara sprinkles in real-life anecdotes into the mystery, like the time a famous couple locked their child in their car and a hotel employee had to break the window to get the baby.

"I wanted to show the entertainment industry from a normal person's point of view -- the absurdity and the seductiveness," says the 17-year Times vet.

Bizzers can catch McNamara in the leadup to Oscar night at Book Soup and Barnes & Noble at the Grove.