BooksChatter: ☀☄ Jump Cut: The Ellie Foreman Mysteries [5]

Thank you for joining us on the Virtual Book Tour for Jump Cut, a Mystery by Libby Fischer Hellmann (29 February 2016, The Red Herrings Press, 287 pages).

This is the fifth book in The Ellie Foreman Mysteries series.

Don't miss our interview with author Libby Fischer Hellmann.

PREVIEW: Check out the book's synopsis, trailer, teaser and excerpt below, as well as details of the other books in the series.

Read the first eight chapters with Amazon Look Inside.

Author Libby Fischer Hellmann will be awarding a $50 Amazon/BN gift card to a randomly drawn winner via Rafflecopter during the tour. Please do take part: comment on our post and follow the tour where you will be able to read other excerpts (☀), interviews (ℚ), reviews (✍) and guest blog posts (✉).

Synopsis | Trailer | Teaser | The Series | Author Q&A | About the Author | Giveaway & Tour Stops

Synopsis

Chicago video producer, Ellie Foreman, has been absent from thriller author Libby Fischer Hellmann’s repertoire for almost a decade. Now she’s back...and soon entangled in a web of espionage, murder and suspicion that threatens to destroy what she holds most dear.

Hired to produce a candyfloss profile of Chicago-based aviation giant, Delcroft, Ellie is dismayed when company VP Charlotte Hollander, the architect of a new anti-drone system for Delcroft, trashes the production and cancels the project. Ellie believes Hollander was spooked by shots of a specific man in the video footage. But when Ellie arranges to meet the man to find out why, he’s killed by a subway train before they can talk. In the confusion, she finds a seemingly abandoned pack of cigarettes with a flash drive inside that belonged to the now dead man.

Ellie has the drive’s contents decrypted, but before long she discovers she’s under surveillance. Suspecting Delcroft and the ambitious Hollander are behind it, she’s unconvinced when Hollander tells her the dead man was a Chinese spy. Ellie and her boyfriend Luke try to find answers, but they don’t realize how far into the dangerous echelons of hidden power they have ventured. When Ellie’s daughter is kidnapped and Charlotte Hollander disappears, it becomes terrifyingly clear that Ellie is in way over her head, and more lives are on the line, including her own.

Teaser: Excerpt

     The sun winked off the frozen surface of Lake Michigan the next morning as I drove south to McCormick Place. During one of the most brutal Chicago winters in decades, the smudge of purple clouds tinged with pink and gold hinted that the fury of winter might—just might—have peaked. I parked in the overpriced lot, bought half a dozen cups of overpriced coffee, and carried them into the massive exhibit hall.
     The crew was setting up lights and shades, and Mac was behind the camera framing shots. MacArthur J. Kendall III owns a production studio in Northbrook. He started out shooting sweet sixteens, bar mitzvahs, and weddings, but parlayed that into corporate videos. We’ve worked together for nearly twenty years, from the days of two-inch video, to one-inch, three-quarter, and now digital.
     Mac’s name, salt-and-pepper hair, button-down shirts, and penny loafers scream WASP, but the nasty scar running down his left cheek saves him from total Episcopalian infamy. He tells people he was attacked by a Mexican drug lord and made me swear never to reveal it was from a car accident.
     I went up to him. “What do you need me to do?”
     “You have the shot list?”
     I nodded and pulled it out of the canvas bag that doubles as my purse. We went over it. He gestured to the main area of the Delcroft booth, which featured a large projection screen with the company logo on both sides, and about twenty chairs arranged theater-style.
     “What time’s the first presentation?”
     Teresa Basso Gold, our client contact, had told us to be prepared for a series of short remarks by Delcroft executives touting the company’s latest innovations.
     I checked my watch. Barely six thirty. “The doors don’t open until nine, and Teresa said not to expect anyone until ten. But you can get some establishing shots, if you want.”
     “Sounds like a plan,” Mac said and strolled over to confer with the crew.

Jump Cut
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The Series: The Ellie Foreman Mysteries

|| [0.5] || [1] || [2] || [3] || [4] ||

Click on the book cover to Look Inside the book on Amazon and read an excerpt.

The Day Miriam Hirsch Disappeared [0.5]

In 1938 sixteen year old Jake Foreman spends his free time with his friend Barney Teitleman in Lawndale, a prosperous Jewish community on Chicago’s near west side. Jake develops a crush on Miriam Hirsch, an actress in the Yiddish theater who lives at the Teitleman’s boarding house, but Miriam only has eyes for Skull, who might or might not be a gangster.

THE DAY MIRIAM HIRSCH DISAPPEARED was the first short story I wrote. Little did I know then that the story would become the “prequel” to my Ellie Foreman series. Or that the Ellie Foreman series would be the prequel to the Georgia Davis series.

The story, which won the Bouchercon short story contest in 1999, was first published in the Bouchercon Program book. It was later published in ANTHOLOGY TODAY, where it also won a contest, and in the now defunct FUTURES MAGAZINE.

[Published 8 May 2010, 27 pages]

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An Eye For Murder [1]

The first novel in crime writer Libby Fischer Hellmann's popular Ellie Foreman mystery series, An Eye for Murder, introduces the documentary filmmaker, single mom, and amateur sleuth in a tale that opens in Nazi-era Prague and closes on the North Shore suburb of present-day Chicago.

When an elderly stranger, Ben Sinclair, watches Ellie's "Celebrate Chicago" cable television show and dies suddenly not long after, Ellie receives a letter from Ben's landlady, who's found Ellie's name on a scrap of paper among Ben's possessions. Agreeing to help dispose of his effects, but not knowing of any connection, Ellie begins to piece together Ben's story from the books and wartime relics he's left behind.

Ellie's search for clues takes her on a dangerous, winding trail from the political present of the North Shore to buried memories of the city's ethnic neighborhoods and steel mills, an illicit love affair, Nazi-era intrigue, and more than one murder thrown in.

Introducing an exciting new character from Libby Fischer Hellmann

An Eye for Murder was nominated for an Anthony Award (Best First), one of the mystery community's most prestigious awards.

[Published 20 November 2002, 329 pages]

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A Picture of Guilt [2]

The big news story in Chicago is the murder trial of Johnny Santoro, a dock worker whose girlfriend has been killed. Most Chicagoans are betting on a quick guilty verdict, but Ellie Foreman has doubts about his complicity--Santoro is strangely familiar to her.

Checking back to the outtakes of a video project in progress while the murder took place, Ellie finds evidence that could save Santoro from a lifetime behind bars. It seems the perfect alibi, but the tape is compromised by radio interference and Santoro goes to jail.

Almost immediately, Ellie's world begins to shift: a suspicious vehicle follows her, the Chicago mob shows up, and the FBI wants to question her. She doesn't have answers, but she has questions of her own about the radio transmissions. Everything indicates that someone wants something from her, something bigger than the Santoro case. If only she could figure out what it is...

[Published 31 May 2003, 325 pages]

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An Image of Death [3]

Chicago filmmaker Ellie Foreman is back, and she's tackling her most dangerous case yet in this dark amateur sleuth thriller from critically acclaimed crime writer Libby Fischer Hellmann.

An Image of Death sees Ellie in the midst of producing another video documentary, financed by a successful Chicago real estate developer. But things take an unexpected turn one winter night when a mysterious package arrives anonymously on Ellie's doorstep. Inside, she finds a surveillance video apparently showing the murder of a young woman. Who was the victim, why was she murdered, and what is her connection to Ellie?

Despite being pushed to one side by the cops, Ellie begins to uncover the victim's dark history, forged in Eastern Europe at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Her search for answers takes her into the murky world of money laundering and diamond dealing, ultimately ending up at a deserted construction site in the hands of people who believe she knows too much...

A thrilling addition to the Ellie Foreman series by Libby Fischer Hellmann

Packed with memorable characters, and neatly tying together a number of gripping plotlines, An Image of Death has been praised by mystery fiction fans as insightful, compelling and entertaining.

[Published 26 January 2004, 301 pages]

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A Shot To Die For [4]

In this fourth crime thriller of the Ellie Foreman series, the Chicago documentary filmmaker finds herself in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. Returning from a video shoot at the Lodge, a newly renovated, upscale resort, Ellie befriends a woman who claims her ride abandoned her at a highway rest stop. But Ellie's kindness is brutally cut short when a pickup truck pulls up, the rear window opens, and the woman is shot dead.

Even with her history of sleuthing, Ellie is not eager to get involved. Then the victims's family arrives and begs for information. When the second shooting occurs, Ellie decides to poke around on her own. She is soon drawn into the history of a wealthy and prominent family, deeply rooted in a magnificent mansion on the shores of the lake, and surrounded by an elaborate web of lies, murder, and family secrets that have plagued both them and the town for years--secrets that now place Ellie in the crosshairs of a killer.

[Published 6 September 2005, 313 pages]

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About the Author

Libby Fischer Hellmann left a career in broadcast news in Washington, DC and moved to Chicago 35 years ago, where she, naturally, began to write gritty crime fiction. Twelve novels and twenty short stories later, she claims they’ll take her out of the Windy City feet first. She has been nominated for many awards in the mystery and crime writing community and has even won a few. *

With the addition of Jump Cut in 2016, her novels include the now five-volume Ellie Foreman series, which she describes as a cross between “Desperate Housewives” and “24;” the hard-boiled 4-volume Georgia Davis PI series, and three stand-alone historical thrillers that Libby calls her “Revolution Trilogy.” Her latest release, The Incidental Spy, is a historical novella set during the early years of the Manhattan Project at the U of Chicago. Her short stories have been published in a dozen anthologies, the Saturday Evening Post, and Ed Gorman’s “25 Criminally Good Short Stories” collection.

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* She has been a finalist twice for the Anthony, twice for Foreword Magazines Book of the Year, the Agatha, the Shamus, the Daphne and has won the Lovey multiple times.

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