Five feet two inches of slick repartee, near-purple hair, and poetic imagination, twenty-year-old Rune hasn't been in Manhattan for very long. But she's crafty enough to have found a squatter's paradise in an empty TriBeCa loft, and a video store job that feeds her passion for old movies. It's a passion she shares with her favorite customer, Mr. Kelly, a lonely old man who rents the same video over and over. The flick is a noir classic based on a real-life unsolved bank heist and a million missing dollars. It's called Manhattan Is My Beat. That's the tape Rune is picking up from Mr. Kelly's shabby apartment when she finds him shot to death. The police suspect a robbery gone wrong, but Rune is certain the key to solving the murder is hidden somewhere in the hazy, black-and-white frames of Mr. Kelly's beloved movie. But as Rune hits the mean streets of New York to find answers, she gets caught up in a dangerous adventure more chilling than anything Hollywood could dream up. As her story draws to its terrifying conclusion, Rune's final close-up may include the killer of a co-star.

From the bestselling author of the Bone Collector novels, soon to be an NBC series Twenty-one-year-old Rune is an aspiring filmmaker, but so far her only break has been scoring a job as an underpaid production assistant in Manhattan. Still, she's always on the lookout for the perfect topic for her own film—and she thinks she's found it when she witnesses the bombing of a triple-X movie theater in Times Square. Rune's got a great hook for her documentary: She plans to film it through the eyes of Shelly Lowe, the porn star whose movie was playing at the theater when it exploded. But just hours after Rune films a poignant Shelly reflecting on her dreams of becoming a serious actress, a second bomb silences the beautiful film star forever. Was Shelly in the wrong place at the wrong time—or was she the bomber's target all along? Rune vows to find out the truth behind the death of this blue movie star. But as she struggles to finish shooting her film, Rune's labor of love may be her final masterpiece—as a shooting of a more lethal kind threatens to write an ending to this story that no one wants to see...

Rune is an aspiring filmmaker with more ambition than political savvy, paying her dues as an assistant cameraperson for the local news. But she's got her eyes on the prize, the network's hot newsmagazine, Current Events—and she's got the story she knows will get her there. Poking around in the video archives, Rune spots a taped interview with Randy Boggs, who's doing hard time in Attica for a murder he claims he didn't commit. Rune can't say exactly why, but she's sure he's innocent. If she can prove it, Current Events won't merely report the news, it'll make news—and Rune's career. But what she could be writing is Randy Boggs' epitaph—and her own. Rune's newly discovered witness soon turns up dead. A hit man from Miami is on Rune's trail, and Boggs is finding prison even more dangerous than before. Someone wants this story killed, and it could be the girl with the camera who ends up on the cutting room floor.