The Last Talent Show
(2026)(The sixth book in the S'more Than Meets the Eye Mystery series)
A Story by Rachel Darrishaw
Alumni Week is Winnie Prine's best idea in ten years: an open invitation to every guest who ever set foot on Camp Do-Over, one discounted week at the very end of the season, ending with a talent show on the last night. Forty-six people come. Half of them are old friends — the birder, the judge, the nurse, the kid with the paddling dream, the woman in the chair on the Chow Hall porch who's been coming every July since 1994. There's color war and archery and cobbler and a fire in the Ring, and the whole thing is so warm that Maddie "Sunny" Byrne lets herself be happy about it. The camp is a camp again. Winnie has a decision she hasn't made and an envelope she hasn't opened, and the question underneath the whole week isn't whether this place survives. It's what it's for now.
Then, by Wednesday morning, Sunny knows something. Three small, checkable, mundane wrong things tell her that somebody on this property has already tried to kill a man and it didn't take — and a person who tries once isn't finished. She tells the sheriff. He believes her before his coffee gets cold, and says exactly why. The county comes out on no crime and no complaint and takes it seriously. For thirty-six hours the camp is watched, guarded, and locked down tight by a woman who has never in her life been better at her job. And it happens anyway, on Thursday night, in a room she filled, during a fifteen-minute intermission she penciled into the schedule herself and initialed MB. A warm, funny, quietly devastating finale in which Sunny has to investigate her own paperwork — and learn the difference between being right in time and being enough.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Then, by Wednesday morning, Sunny knows something. Three small, checkable, mundane wrong things tell her that somebody on this property has already tried to kill a man and it didn't take — and a person who tries once isn't finished. She tells the sheriff. He believes her before his coffee gets cold, and says exactly why. The county comes out on no crime and no complaint and takes it seriously. For thirty-six hours the camp is watched, guarded, and locked down tight by a woman who has never in her life been better at her job. And it happens anyway, on Thursday night, in a room she filled, during a fifteen-minute intermission she penciled into the schedule herself and initialed MB. A warm, funny, quietly devastating finale in which Sunny has to investigate her own paperwork — and learn the difference between being right in time and being enough.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Used availability for Rachel Darrishaw's The Last Talent Show