Curtain Call

In the seventh of the Charlotte Diamond mysteries, retired FBI senior investigator Charlotte and her significant other, box office senior movie star Brenda Boynton, return from a Florida Everglades movie shoot to an economically distressed village, Hopewell on the Choptank, on Maryland’s Chesapeake Bay shore. A scheme by New Jersey mobsters to build an illegal casino resort has collapsed but not before half the village has been leveled and the local business owners have committed to overexpansion.

Brenda comes with a saving plan to use lottery winnings to establish a retirement community for destitute movie industry retirees in the village. While both Brenda and Charlotte bring this plan to fruition, Charlotte contends with a flurry of auto thefts, a murderess on the loose, a sixty-year old bank heist buried treasure, the return of her former husband and his acidic mother, and a group of old movie folks so ungrateful and motivated by revenge that soon someone swings from a chandelier, threatening to return the village to chaos and Brenda and Charlotte’s dreams to dust.