Dress Rehearsal for Murder
(2026)(The second book in the Nora Blackwell Cozy Mystery series)
A novel by Dianne Harman
A hidden painting. A careful lie. A town that keeps its secrets—until Nora Blackwell opens the trunk.
After a whirlwind of unwanted fame from her last brush with true crime, vintage shop owner Nora Blackwell wants nothing more than Millbrook’s ordinary comforts: cinnamon in the air, Ella on the playlist, Gatsby snoring on the velvet settee. But when a legendary local theater clears out its late director’s estate, Nora can’t resist the lure of exquisite costumes—and the locked prop trunk that Gatsby refuses to ignore. Inside waits a small, haunting canvas wrapped with the care of a confession. It looks like a seventeenth-century Dutch masterwork. It isn’t. And whoever hid it meant for it to be found by no one.
Soon Nora is navigating the theater’s fault lines—an exacting stage manager with a long memory, a poised widow with firm requests, a vanished ingénue who returns with a story she’s held for decades—while a brilliant new ally from the college art department reads the painting’s surface like a diary. Layer by layer, technique gives way to truth: the work is a mid-century forgery of staggering talent, a perfect lever for a man who collected people’s secrets as ruthlessly as he curated their performances. As whispers of old scandals collide with present-day power plays, Nora must decide how to reveal a past that could ruin the living, redeem the silenced, and place a priceless target squarely in her little shop. With Gatsby’s unerring instincts at her side and a slow-blooming romance learning the steps between trust and truth, Nora follows the trail from costume rails to canvas fibers, all the way to the one signature no one dared acknowledge—until now.
Genre: Mystery
After a whirlwind of unwanted fame from her last brush with true crime, vintage shop owner Nora Blackwell wants nothing more than Millbrook’s ordinary comforts: cinnamon in the air, Ella on the playlist, Gatsby snoring on the velvet settee. But when a legendary local theater clears out its late director’s estate, Nora can’t resist the lure of exquisite costumes—and the locked prop trunk that Gatsby refuses to ignore. Inside waits a small, haunting canvas wrapped with the care of a confession. It looks like a seventeenth-century Dutch masterwork. It isn’t. And whoever hid it meant for it to be found by no one.
Soon Nora is navigating the theater’s fault lines—an exacting stage manager with a long memory, a poised widow with firm requests, a vanished ingénue who returns with a story she’s held for decades—while a brilliant new ally from the college art department reads the painting’s surface like a diary. Layer by layer, technique gives way to truth: the work is a mid-century forgery of staggering talent, a perfect lever for a man who collected people’s secrets as ruthlessly as he curated their performances. As whispers of old scandals collide with present-day power plays, Nora must decide how to reveal a past that could ruin the living, redeem the silenced, and place a priceless target squarely in her little shop. With Gatsby’s unerring instincts at her side and a slow-blooming romance learning the steps between trust and truth, Nora follows the trail from costume rails to canvas fibers, all the way to the one signature no one dared acknowledge—until now.
Genre: Mystery