Volunteer usher Heidi Ranes has spent twenty years learning the rhythms of the Haverford Playhouse - every creaking floorboard, every backstage grudge, every patron who needs the aisle seat for a bad knee. She knows this building the way she knows her own handwriting.
Which is why, on the opening night of A Season of Knives, she recognizes the difference between theatrical drama and something darker. A whispered threat in the wings. A playwright who fails to rise from his final bow. A police determination of cardiac event that doesn't quite account for a flask wiped too clean, a thirty-year-old plagiarism quietly buried in the archive, and a row of foxglove blooming along the building's south garden wall.
The police call it a tragic accident. Heidi calls it a pattern.
Armed with a medical transcriptionist's eye for clinical language, an archivist's instinct for missing records, and the particular invisibility of a woman who hands out programs for a living, Heidi navigates a company full of secrets: a director with a public grudge, a lead actress whose private letters found their way into the script, a benefactor's son with a will dispute, a wardrobe mistress who has been waiting thirty years to say something, and a company manager whose calm is a little too carefully constructed.
In a theater full of performers, everyone is hiding something. But only one person has been rehearsing this particular ending for a very long time.
Foxglove in the Footlights is a slow-burn, atmosphere-rich cozy mystery for readers who like their murder served with strong tea, homemade shortbread, and the particular chill of a New England October. Perfect for fans of Jacqueline Winspear, MC Beaton, and Julia Buckley.
