“It is opening night at the London Palladium, and tensions are running high amongst the feuding cast of "Leopard Spots." Amongst them are an ageing lothario, a national treasure, an amateur psychic and a comedian-turned actor all vying for the spotlight. When an on-stage accident forces an unexpected intermission, it is clear only to dresser Jayne that the drama has turned deadly. Can she step out of the wings and identify the killer before it is too late? Or will murder make an encore.”
Clary does take an interesting, if often tedious, route setting up this whodunit. Instead of starting with the murder, we go roughly 170 pages into the backstory before we get to Peter Milano’s death on stage. I mean, it’s another way to set the table for the murder by giving all the exposition upfront instead of incorporating throughout the book. It tries hard to give the reader a better chance of figuring out who the killer “will be” instead working it out through the rest of the tale.
Also the story is told from different perspectives: first person diary entries from the protagonist, WhatsApp chats, newspaper articles, and notes from Clary, who exists as a minor character within the tale (I’ve always had issues with authors who insert hyper-reality versions of themselves into their own books. It’s weird and arrogant).
Clary also gives a piss-poor look at a certain gay character, who while probably does exist in real life, but I still found Gordon a terrible human being. There are a few plot holes that made me role my eyes at, and that’s not even counting some of the typos and sentence structure that should’ve been caught by a better editor.
In the end, despite attempting (as noted in the prologue) to upset the apple cart in telling these British cosy mysteries, Curtain Call to Murder, while sometimes funny and odd, never fully gels and becomes more than just a bit too campy and trashy, and not very deep, for my tastes.
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