Moore also takes us back in time into the jury room for a bracing reminder of how hard it is to sit in judgment over matters of life and death. Wait for the moment when the jury reconvenes for one last time, like retired grifters meeting up for a final job, to render a private verdict with profound moral repercussions. That’s some criminal justice.

“I mix up movies and memory,” says Marissa Dahl in Elizabeth Little’s PRETTY AS A PICTURE (Viking, 338 pp., $27). A film editor who can’t much tell where stories end and life begins, Marissa is also prickly, hyperarticulate, suspicious, neurotic, surprisingly tough and very funny — the ideal narrator for a book that pays homage to Hollywood and classic detective fiction.

Hired by an eccentric director to work on a true-crime movie about a long-ago murder, Marissa travels to an island off the coast of Delaware where she’s ordered to relinquish her phone, talk to no one and remain isolated in her room when not on set. No one will tell her why her predecessor was fired, or why accidents keep befalling the cast and crew.

Then the actress playing the victim turns up murdered herself, and it looks as if Marissa is next on the killer’s list. Joined by a delightful pair of preteen Nancy Drew wannabes, Marissa sets out to solve the case, wearing her love of film like a shield and wielding it like a weapon. Numerous films are referred to by name throughout; others I deduced myself, as when Marissa manages to allude (in her head) to scenes in “Kill Bill” and “Rear Window” while someone attempts to kill her.

The book celebrates women who have each other’s backs and put their friends ahead of their men. It is also a valentine to the intoxications of filmmaking and film-viewing. Marissa speaks with real love about corralling disparate scenes into a graceful and coherent narrative. “An editor — that is to say, a film editor — isn’t really so different from a detective,” she says. Or a novelist.