This boxed set collection features two contemporary mystery/thrillers by Gail Hulnick, each set in a different medium -- television and movies -- and both entwining the lives of three women friends at different stages of life: mid twenties, mid forties, and mid sixties.
The Lion's Share of the Air Time tells the story of the unexpected death of a star investigative reporter in Vancouver, Canada. Chelan Montgomery, a young woman navigating her first career job as a journalist, decides to try to find out why her colleague jumped to his death, as the police are saying, when his teenage son asks her to get involved in finding out whether he was pushed. The clues she follows lead her through the lives of elite athletes (just two years before the Vancouver/Whistler 2010 Winter Olympics), media executives, property developers and TV stars. As the number of suspicious media deaths rises, Chelan starts to fear that the killer will be coming for her, next.
A Bird in the Sand picks up the lives of Chelan, Nevada and Lillian six years later. The setting is Savannah, Georgia and the world is making movies. The mystery this time involves the theft of a priceless, ancient piece of jewelry -- a golden bird, hanging on a chain -- and not just one piece of jewelry, but a trio of pendants, handcrafted more than five hundred years earlier. This time it is Nevada Leacock who is at the center of the action, visiting in Savannah while trying to solve her midlife career crisis and come to some sort of reconciliation with her father. As the race to find the three missing pendants speeds up, her father's house is ransacked, her car is chased (while she's the one driving it, and her friend, Lillian in Key West, Florida, finds herself drawn into the web around a treasure diving expedition directly connected to the missing birds.
A Bird in the Sand won a Bronze Award in the Royal Palm Literary Awards in 2020.