The Silent Film Scandal
(2025)(The tenth book in the Maisie Meadows Cozy Mystery series)
A novel by Max Myka
The Silent Film ScandalDusty old cupboards rarely hide murder... until now.
When Maisie Meadows volunteers to clean out a forgotten storage cupboard at Niceville High School (because apparently having a social life is overrated), she expects nothing more thrilling than expired cleaning supplies and possibly a spider with world domination ambitions. What she doesn't expect is a box of mysterious film canisters and a leather-bound diary belonging to silent film star Dolores Hampton.
And Maisie certainly doesn't expect that showing these treasures to local film historian Theodore Blackwood would result in him turning up dead the very next morning—arranged with cinematic precision beneath a projector beam with a strip of film wound tightly around his neck.
The message scrawled at the crime scene? "Some stars should stay silent."
With her faithful corgi Waffles (who approaches crime scenes with the methodical intensity of a tax auditor who suspects fraud), Maisie dives headfirst into Niceville's most tantalizing mystery. Why was Dolores Hampton—1920s Hollywood darling—secretly creating experimental films in this small Florida town? What connection does this have to Niceville's powerful Harrington family? And who's willing to kill to keep these decades-old secrets buried?
Aided by "The Old Guard"—four octogenarians with a collective age of approximately three hundred and forty years, a memory network that puts the National Archives to shame, and an alarming talent for blackmail—Maisie uncovers a web of deception stretching from Hollywood's Golden Age to present-day Niceville.
As the body count rises and attempts on Maisie's life become alarmingly frequent, she finds herself in a reluctant partnership with Detective Joe Callahan, whose exasperation with her "meddling" is matched only by his grudging respect for her results.
With wit as sharp as the killer's blade and a corgi whose strategic positioning for treat acquisition would impress military generals, Maisie must solve a mystery nearly a century in the making—preferably without becoming the final scene in her own murder mystery.
Book 9 in the beloved Maisie Meadows Cozy Mystery Series, where small-town secrets meet big-time trouble!
Genre: Cozy Mystery
When Maisie Meadows volunteers to clean out a forgotten storage cupboard at Niceville High School (because apparently having a social life is overrated), she expects nothing more thrilling than expired cleaning supplies and possibly a spider with world domination ambitions. What she doesn't expect is a box of mysterious film canisters and a leather-bound diary belonging to silent film star Dolores Hampton.
And Maisie certainly doesn't expect that showing these treasures to local film historian Theodore Blackwood would result in him turning up dead the very next morning—arranged with cinematic precision beneath a projector beam with a strip of film wound tightly around his neck.
The message scrawled at the crime scene? "Some stars should stay silent."
With her faithful corgi Waffles (who approaches crime scenes with the methodical intensity of a tax auditor who suspects fraud), Maisie dives headfirst into Niceville's most tantalizing mystery. Why was Dolores Hampton—1920s Hollywood darling—secretly creating experimental films in this small Florida town? What connection does this have to Niceville's powerful Harrington family? And who's willing to kill to keep these decades-old secrets buried?
Aided by "The Old Guard"—four octogenarians with a collective age of approximately three hundred and forty years, a memory network that puts the National Archives to shame, and an alarming talent for blackmail—Maisie uncovers a web of deception stretching from Hollywood's Golden Age to present-day Niceville.
As the body count rises and attempts on Maisie's life become alarmingly frequent, she finds herself in a reluctant partnership with Detective Joe Callahan, whose exasperation with her "meddling" is matched only by his grudging respect for her results.
With wit as sharp as the killer's blade and a corgi whose strategic positioning for treat acquisition would impress military generals, Maisie must solve a mystery nearly a century in the making—preferably without becoming the final scene in her own murder mystery.
Book 9 in the beloved Maisie Meadows Cozy Mystery Series, where small-town secrets meet big-time trouble!
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Used availability for Max Myka's The Silent Film Scandal