Like "Based on Availability" this book focused on a manager in a fancy hotel, and I started out loving it. What I always call "evil Hollywood" truly is evil as bodies pile up just before the Oscars. Juliette deals with diva demands, a star's secret medical treatment in the penthouse, and romance while ducking danger and trying to solve the murders. Maybe I was missing something, but the eventual answer didn't quite make sense and I didn't feel like rereading to figure it out. ( )

It's never a good sign when you find yourself half-way through a several-hundred page book and still not caring how it ends. Abandoned. ( )

Oscar Season by Mary McNamara is a fast-pace mystery novel set during Hollywood’s most tumultuous time of the year: the time period between the Academy Award nominations announcement and Oscar night. At first, Oscar season at the hotel seems to be business as usual for PR Director of the Pinnacle Hotel, Juliette Greyson. Well, as usual as can be for one of Hollywood’s hottest hotels hosting all of the big name celebrities who come to stay for Oscar week. That is until a series of mysterious deaths start to seem all too connected to be coincidence. Is someone trying to sabotage the Oscars? And if so, why?

Mary McNamara spent time with the people who run the Four Seasons in Los Angeles to get a real insiders view of the preparations that go into making a high end hotel run smoothly during Oscar season. Her attention to detail makes this novel compulsively readable and intriguing.

Where this book fails is as a mystery novel. The mystery that propels the story line in Oscar Season falls flat in the end. The ending was anticlimactic and dull. McNamara never manages to truly spin a suspenseful thriller.

Pick up this book for a fun behind the scenes glimpse of the inner workings of a Hollywood hotel during this glittering time of year in LA but not to indulge in a real mystery story. ( )