Death Takes Center Stage
A Community Theatre Cozy Mystery

About this book:

When the curtain rises on opening night at the Oakcreek Community Theatre, the only thing more dramatic than Julian Vance's ego is his sudden, very real death—center stage, mid-soliloquy, with a poisoned goblet in hand. For head seamstress Daisy Adams, the showstopper isn't the gothic melodrama she's spent weeks stitching together; it's the murder that turns her beloved theatre into a crime scene. With the police sealing the doors and the cast trapped backstage, Daisy realizes she's the only one who knows every pocket, pin, and secret passage in the old opera house—and the only one who noticed the cryptic note left on her cutting board: *The curtain has only just risen.*

Julian made enemies as easily as he took bows, from the beleaguered director desperate for a hit to the understudy praying for a break, the prop master with a grudge, and the diva who tolerated no upstaging—even in death. As Detective Thomas Wright, Daisy's old high school classmate, warns her to stick to sewing, the theatre's financial ruin looms closer than the killer's next cue. But Daisy knows these boards better than anyone: the hidden flask in a dressing table, the rivalry stitched into every seam, the debts paid in poison instead of cash. In a town where everyone has a motive and the script keeps changing, the costume designer is about to tailor her own investigation—before the murderer calls for an encore.