Movieland is the fourth installment of Lee Goldberg’s Eve Ronin series. At 26, Ronin is the youngest homicide investigator in the history of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s department. She shot up the ranks of detectives, past more senior, male deputies after being caught on camera decking a famous action star/wife beater nicknamed “bloodfist.” She’s inexperienced, but determined. Many of her fellow deputies resent her, and have only grown to hate her more as she proceeded to uncover a ring of corrupt rapists in the ranks of the department.
Her exploits, like saving a child from a wildfire, only make Eve more famous in the public eye—and valuable to a department riddled with scandal and bad press—but more hated by her colleagues. She’s perpetually in a tough spot. She doesn’t care. She just wants to do her job. She works out of a station in Calabasas, which is at the western end of the San Fernando Valley, an area with many intersection law enforcement jurisdictions.
She isn’t interested in fame, though everyone thinks she is, or should be. It’s LA, after all, and her selling of her story rights to a TV series called “Ronin” only exacerbates her reputation as an attention whore. She actually loathes the publicity and the TV show, but she needs money to fend of a wrongful death lawsuit brought by the family of a deputy who killed himself after she exposed him as a crook.
Movieland leads off with the murder of a woman in Malibu Creek State Park, an enormous wilderness area in the Santa Monica Mountains. The park is the “movieland” of the title, because it was the location for many films and TV shows over the years. However, for Goldberg, the entire Los Angeles area, and culture, comprise “movieland.” Everyone in LA is obsessed with movies and TV. They want to be in the movies. Everyone’s a wannabee, especially Eve’s mother, a lifelong film extra who considers herself an actress. Her absentee father is a hack TV director.
Having lived in LA for 26 years, six of which I spent working in the TV industry, I can attest to the truth of this idea. So many people in LA want to be in “the business” or fancy themselves as part of it even when they’re ridiculously outside the loop. It makes perfect sense that all of Eve’s colleagues cannot understand why she isn’t interested in all the fame and fortune she seems to be close to getting, with so little effort.
For Eve, the glare of public adoration is a distraction she doesn’t want. She values her privacy and she wants to catch bad guys. In this case, it means working closely with her partner Duncan “Donuts” Pavone, an overweight, highly experienced old timer who’s days away from retirement. Pavone suspects that the murder in the park is part of a much bigger crime spree that’s been covered up by the park police and the LASD.
Eve and Pavone try to get to the bottom of it, but they face stonewalling and threats all around. No one wants to kill off tourism at the park, which is a big economic plus for an area that needs all the dollars it can get.
More killings ensue, however, so it becomes impossible to ignore the shootings and cover them up. The story breaks in the press in spectacularly bad fashion. Eve gets put in charge of the park shooter task force. Things don’t go smoothly, though, but let’s just say she solves the case through a combination of smarts, diligence, and scrappiness.
There’s a lot going on in the Eve Ronin series. The books are part satire, part mystery, and part feminist lit as written by a middle-aged white guy. Her name provides a clue to a character who seems to represent a new generation of crime fiction heroines. She’s Eve, the primal matriarch of a new line of women. She’s also Ronin, the name given to 12th century Japanese samurai who lost their masters and roamed the countryside getting into fights. That’s this character, for sure. She’s constantly getting into fights, though most of them are thrust upon her by clueless, sexist men who feel threatened by her.
In this sense, Goldberg seems to be grappling with a new generation of women in the world. Like Michael Connelly, now writing about Harry’s Bosch’s daughter, and John Sandford with his Letty Davenport books, Goldberg has created a female character that’s self-confident and unapologetic about being a woman—though slightly bothered by what might be imposter syndrome. Goldberg showcases his talent by demonstrating the many ridiculous pressures that a woman faces when trying to be taken seriously in a world that’s still male dominated, but quickly losing ground to a new world view.
And, while he shows us that Eve attractive, he doesn’t dwell on her looks the way so many male mystery writers have in the past. In an earlier era, the Eve Ronin character would have taken down the bad guys with the reader hearing about how her boobs jiggled but her hair looked perfect. We’re done with that kind of female detective, and that’s a good thing.
Movieland is a fun read. It’s an effective mystery that packs in a few laughs and some thought provoking ideas along the way.