Props, Pearls, and Poison
(2026)(The third book in the Seabrook Pavilion Mystery series)
A novel by Diana Beckett
The Seabrook Pavilion was supposed to be saved by sequins, not scandal.
Costume mistress Mabs Dyer has gambled everything on a glittering plan: a vintage costume exhibition and auction to fund the Pavilion’s crumbling roof and keep the donors from tightening their grip. With press in the aisles and society collectors circling like gulls, the show is finally going Mabs’s way until the visiting London appraiser is found dead in the Pavilion’s locked Reading Room, a cordial glass nearby and a key placed a little too neatly to be chance.
Worse, the victim’s last words to Mabs were a warning: one of the Pavilion’s prized pieces isn’t just valuable, it’s stolen.
Now the auction isn’t a fundraiser. It’s a trap.
As DS Theo Briggs fights political pressure to call the death what it is, Mabs races through backstage corridors, provenance envelopes, and polished lies to find who silenced the appraiser and why. Every suspect has a reason to want the truth buried: performers with secrets, board members with clean hands and dirty paperwork, and a glamorous London bidder who smiles like she already owns the ending.
Then the jewel set vanishes.
If Mabs can’t recover it before dawn, it won’t just be the evidence that disappears. It will be her last chance to follow the trail tied to her missing mother and the blackbird mark that keeps turning up in all the wrong places.
Props, Pearls, and Poison is Book 3 in The Seabrook Pavilion Mysteries, a witty 1920s cozy mystery packed with theatre secrets, sharp suspects, and fair-play clues.
Genre: Mystery
Costume mistress Mabs Dyer has gambled everything on a glittering plan: a vintage costume exhibition and auction to fund the Pavilion’s crumbling roof and keep the donors from tightening their grip. With press in the aisles and society collectors circling like gulls, the show is finally going Mabs’s way until the visiting London appraiser is found dead in the Pavilion’s locked Reading Room, a cordial glass nearby and a key placed a little too neatly to be chance.
Worse, the victim’s last words to Mabs were a warning: one of the Pavilion’s prized pieces isn’t just valuable, it’s stolen.
Now the auction isn’t a fundraiser. It’s a trap.
As DS Theo Briggs fights political pressure to call the death what it is, Mabs races through backstage corridors, provenance envelopes, and polished lies to find who silenced the appraiser and why. Every suspect has a reason to want the truth buried: performers with secrets, board members with clean hands and dirty paperwork, and a glamorous London bidder who smiles like she already owns the ending.
Then the jewel set vanishes.
If Mabs can’t recover it before dawn, it won’t just be the evidence that disappears. It will be her last chance to follow the trail tied to her missing mother and the blackbird mark that keeps turning up in all the wrong places.
Props, Pearls, and Poison is Book 3 in The Seabrook Pavilion Mysteries, a witty 1920s cozy mystery packed with theatre secrets, sharp suspects, and fair-play clues.
Genre: Mystery
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