Deadly Dress Rehearsal
(2026)(The first book in the Seabrook Pavilion Mystery series)
A novel by Diana Beckett
Mabs Dyer came to Seabrook for one thing: a quiet job in a seaside theatre where nobody cared about her London scandal. The Seabrook Pavilion needed a costume mistress. Mabs needed a fresh start. Perfect.
Until opening week delivers a dead patron in a locked room.
Lionel Ashcroft, the Pavilion’s richest backer, is found staged like a tragic tableau inside the upstairs costume room. No signs of a struggle. No obvious injury. Just a teacup, a key placed a little too neatly, and a building full of people who are very practiced at smiling through lies.
The police want a tidy explanation. The donors want silence. The local gossip columnist wants Mabs’s name in print. And DS Theo Briggs, the one officer with enough spine to question the ‘accident’ story, is getting leaned on from above.
Mabs knows costumes. She knows seams, pins, hands, and who touched what. She also knows when a scene has been arranged.
When she finds a torn diary page stitched into a gown, naming her missing mother and a long-buried charity scandal, the case stops being about one dead man. It becomes about a town that protects its own, and what it will do to keep the past profitable.
If Mabs can’t unpick the truth fast, she won’t just lose her job.
She’ll be the next thing Seabrook decides to bury.
Genre: Mystery
Until opening week delivers a dead patron in a locked room.
Lionel Ashcroft, the Pavilion’s richest backer, is found staged like a tragic tableau inside the upstairs costume room. No signs of a struggle. No obvious injury. Just a teacup, a key placed a little too neatly, and a building full of people who are very practiced at smiling through lies.
The police want a tidy explanation. The donors want silence. The local gossip columnist wants Mabs’s name in print. And DS Theo Briggs, the one officer with enough spine to question the ‘accident’ story, is getting leaned on from above.
Mabs knows costumes. She knows seams, pins, hands, and who touched what. She also knows when a scene has been arranged.
When she finds a torn diary page stitched into a gown, naming her missing mother and a long-buried charity scandal, the case stops being about one dead man. It becomes about a town that protects its own, and what it will do to keep the past profitable.
If Mabs can’t unpick the truth fast, she won’t just lose her job.
She’ll be the next thing Seabrook decides to bury.
Genre: Mystery
Used availability for Diana Beckett's Deadly Dress Rehearsal