Cynthia Riggs, Shooting Star

Shooting Star

Cynthia Riggs

Dunne, May 2007, $23.95

ISBN: 031237027X

On Martha's Vineyard, nonagenarian poet Victoria Trumbull is excited as she is the playwright of Island Players, a local amateur group's summer stock adaptation of Frankenstein that is truer to the Shelley novel than Hollywood's poetic license. Many of her friends have parts in the production and all seems to be going fine at first until maniacal martinet director Dearborn Hall begins spinning the production closer to Hollywood than Shelley's condemnation of the horrors of the Industrial Revolution. Still, Victoria feels good about her work as the theatre prepares for opening night.

However, disaster strikes when eight-year-old performer Teddy Vanderhoop, performing the role of Victor's five-year-old younger brother vanishes. At about the same time he disappears, someone kills Peg Storm, the actress performing the part of the Frankenstein housekeeper. Frightened by the tragedies as everyone assumes Teddy's dead, cast members quit before they are killed too. Dearborn refuses to close the production down as the show must go on even while the police search for the child and the killer as does the ninety-two-year-old, first-time playwright.

The seventh Martha's Vineyard mystery thriller is a fun, lighthearted tale that fans of the series will fully enjoy. Besides insight into the original Frankenstein, the whodunit is shrewdly set up from almost the onset, keeping readers wondering who and why. SHOOTING STAR is a wonderful amateur sleuth tale (although the feisty heroine has become certified as a graduate of the Tisbury Citizen Police Academy) that will have the audience applauding for encore performances.

Harriet Klausner