This cosy mystery features a music festival event at the Blue Ridge Mountains location of Celebrations at Ivy Springs. MURDER STRIKES A CHORD is the first in a series called the Pearly Girls.
Cassidy Jamison runs Celebrations and she starts by introducing herself to the road crew who arrive to set up the stage. The four sixty-ish ‘Pearly Girls’ are employees at her late grandmother’s event-planning business, which she inherited. The four lively ladies are more than delighted to have a rock-and-roll music festival which will have a mix of tribute bands and the real thing, with headliners the Weathermen, a famous rock band that never split up but doesn’t release new music. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long before the band members are at odds – well they never got a break from one another over the years, and performers are notoriously temperamental. At night, in pitch dark, somehow a murder occurs.
Cassidy and her chihuahua mix Elvis are out walking when the brave little dog discovers a body, and the investigation begins. Can the Weathermen continue to perform, and will the media or general opinion tear down the rest of the festival? Poor Cassidy has a lot of organising problems.
If you want to see behind the scenes of a music festival you’ll be interested in this amusing tale, whether you like rock-and-roll or bluegrass. I found a few issues stopped me from being fully convinced. One is that with the emphasis on the golden years staff, I kept thinking Cassidy was a similar age or fifty-ish, but she’s supposed to be younger. She does a lot of computer searches about the band, but so does the staff. Cassidy could perhaps have used an iPod to play technopunk or hip-hop on her walks. Cassidy smiles at a handsome police officer, which is stereotypical for cosies, and I’m thinking, he’s going to be married, it’s a small town. Despite having paid security staff patrolling, Cassidy never thinks of phoning or messaging them. She calls 911 and tells them as far as she knows nobody is near her, but then has to wait while they drive out to the grounds and try to locate her. Why not call her 24-hour on-site security? They know where the grotto is, and they can make sure there are no prowlers.
With extremely tasty foods provided and plenty of healthy exercise, I enjoyed MURDER STRIKES A CHORD. Heather Weidner has previously written other cosies and her Pearly Girls enjoy snooping into the lives of the famous. Normally a series is named for the main sleuth, so this seems an attempt to capture two age groups, modern festivals with nostalgia.
Veronica Mars meets The Golden Girls as event planner Cassidy Jamison and her four sixty-year-old employees race to solve a rocker’s murder before the curtains close on their show and their business.
When Cassidy Jamison inherited her late grandmother’s event planning business, she also inherited her grandmother’s friends—four sixty-year-old women known around town as the Pearly Girls—as part-time employees. Now Cassidy barely has time to breathe between spending every waking hour trying to keep her business afloat and the Pearly Girls out of trouble and focused on event planning.
So when she lands a three-weekend event complete with a chart-topping band, she’s thrilled. Until she and her chihuahua mix Elvis find the body of the Weathermen’s lead singer in her venue’s koi pond. With the help of the not-so-helpful Pearly Girls, Cassidy must stave off the bad publicity, navigate the prying questions of the local police department, and solve the murder before the media frenzy shutters her business for good, and takes one of the Pearly Girls with it.
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