About this item
Welcome to Broadway - and to an unthinkable crime! Former theatre starlet turned amateur sleuth Jessie Beckett gets mixed up in murder when an on-stage shooting turns all too real.. New York, 1926. It's not like Jessie Beckett goes around looking for murders to solve, but the vaudeville star turned movie script girl has a natural talent for it. After a lifetime on stage, she's sensitive to details that other people miss.. So when leading theater star Allen Crenshaw is shot live on stage during a performance of hit Broadway show Rules of Engagement - a horrified Jessie watching from the second row - she knows she has to act fast before Allen's co-star, the beautiful Norah Rose, goes down for murder. After all, it was Norah who fired the fateful bullet .
About the Author
I'm an Army brat who has lived in Virginia most of my adult life. I received my BA and MA in history from the College of William and Mary and taught American history and museum studies at Virginia Commonwealth University for thirteen years. I am the author of 200 magazine articles, most on history, travel, and business topics, and of a dozen nonfiction books. The Impersonator (2013) was my first foray into fiction (and it won the national Mystery Writers of America award for Best First Crime Novel) ; Silent Murders (2014) is a sequel. The third, Renting Silence, came out in 2016 and the fourth, Murder in Disguise, is due in August, 2017. I'm having a ball with the Roaring Twenties era and my characters, who are starting to seem like family! Meanwhile, I have a new gothic romance, Stolen Memories, available in paperback and as an ebook.
In first grade I took a shine to Show and Tell and have never stopped. Whenever I teach or lecture, I bring Stuff along with me, historical Stuff that helps paint a picture of my subject or era. For my Roaring Twenties mystery series, I've been collecting items that relate to both period and plot. So far I have a dozen vaudeville programs, two beaded flapper dresses that belonged to my grandmother, some period magazines and advertisements, a blown-glass fisherman's float, and most recently, a bottle of mercury bichloride (empty!) , the medicine/poison that figures in Silent Murders.
The Roaring Twenties is the most fascinating decade in American history and the perfect setting for a mystery series.
