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A murder on stage. A killer in the wings. Can DCI Oldroyd unmask them before the final curtain?
It’s opening night for the Skipton Players, and their Victorian melodrama is going down a storm. But when the climactic hanging scene ends in a sickening silence, it’s clear something has gone terribly wrong. The safety rope has been switched – and actor Joe Hardy is dead, hanged in full view of a horrified audience.
DCI Jim Oldroyd is called in from Harrogate by his old colleague DI Bob Craven. The cast and crew all had access backstage, and Hardy was a man who made enemies easily. There’s a stage manager with a volatile history with the victim, a lighting technician who could barely hide his contempt, and a director who’d grown tired of Hardy’s grandstanding. But which of them wanted him dead badly enough to kill him in front of a packed house?
The case is made more complicated by a chilling connection. Ten years earlier, a teenager was found murdered and buried in a shallow grave in Skipton Castle Woods – and Hardy had been in a relationship with the girl’s mother at the time. Now both mother and surviving daughter are part of tonight’s production.
Two crimes. One town. A decade apart. Can Oldroyd find the thread that connects them before the killer takes another bow?
Genre: Cozy Mystery
It’s opening night for the Skipton Players, and their Victorian melodrama is going down a storm. But when the climactic hanging scene ends in a sickening silence, it’s clear something has gone terribly wrong. The safety rope has been switched – and actor Joe Hardy is dead, hanged in full view of a horrified audience.
DCI Jim Oldroyd is called in from Harrogate by his old colleague DI Bob Craven. The cast and crew all had access backstage, and Hardy was a man who made enemies easily. There’s a stage manager with a volatile history with the victim, a lighting technician who could barely hide his contempt, and a director who’d grown tired of Hardy’s grandstanding. But which of them wanted him dead badly enough to kill him in front of a packed house?
The case is made more complicated by a chilling connection. Ten years earlier, a teenager was found murdered and buried in a shallow grave in Skipton Castle Woods – and Hardy had been in a relationship with the girl’s mother at the time. Now both mother and surviving daughter are part of tonight’s production.
Two crimes. One town. A decade apart. Can Oldroyd find the thread that connects them before the killer takes another bow?
Genre: Cozy Mystery