The Body in the Cast

 The Body in the Cast (1993) by Katherine Hall Page

Hollywood is coming to New England. The quiet little town of Aleford, Massachusetts is chosen by legendary director Max Reed as the site of his cinematic retelling of Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic The Scarlet Letter. The town is already in a bit of an uproar over a local election which features a candidate using smear tactics to try and get an upper-hand on his more popular opponent. The movie folk don't help matters, bringing their own infighting, jealousies, and talented tantrum-throwers.

Faith Fairchild, wife of the local pastor and owner of the Have Faith catering company, is up to eyebrows in the Hollywood glamor--Have Faith has been chosen to provide all the snacks and meals for the horde of glitzy stars. Everything is going well until someone doctors the black bean soup and there is a question of whether it was a practical joke or a targeted attack on certain members of the cast. But when the star's body double is poisoned, it soon becomes apparent that the practical joker is deadly serious. Another death follows and Faith is determined to find the links and help the local police find the killer before the bodies in the cast outnumber the living.

I have to say that I didn't find this entry in the Faith Fairchild series as appealing. For one thing, I didn't much care for the two stories lines--politics and movie-making. Tying the two murders together seemed forced and I think the plot would have been much improved if we'd had just one thread to follow. I'm still not clear how the second victim got their hands on the items that forced the killer to eliminate them. Or why it was necessary to foist that plot line on us. We could have achieved the same effect if the second victim had come from the inner circle of Hollywood folk. 

Faith also annoyed me a bit. She's a pastor's wife, but she's a terrible snob. Both about food and about clothes. Maybe it's always been there and I just never noticed before--but this time around she seemed to be name-dropping famous designer clothes right, left, and center. Most of the small town pastor's wives I've come across would be lucky to own one designer clothes item let alone multiple outfits. But that's a small quibble.

The actual mystery-solving by Faith went well. There's a tiny bit of coincidence--she just happens to be in the right place at the right time to discover the second murder fairly quickly. It's not like she had followed up some clue that helped her figure out who was next on the hit list or where the action might take place. But she does recognize other clues that the police miss and her right-hand helper Pix also does some nifty detective work of her own. 

A decent cozy mystery that unfortunately wasn't (for me) as good as previous selections from the series.  ★★★--just.

First line: Aleford, Massachusetts was reeling--literally.

Last line: And Marta winked.

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Deaths = 2 (one poisoned; one hit on head)