Claire Gray Mystery

After 30 some odd years of success as a director on Broadway, Claire Gray has accepted her first academic position, that of a theatrical director at the richly funded Desert Arts College in Palm Springs. Having lived a largely peaceful life in Manhattan, she is stunned to find herself in the midst of the second murder, and murder investigation, in a matter of months in Palm Springs. This time it's a local aged and ailing collector, who frequently lends pieces to local charity events or dramatic productions, found dead shortly after Claire's friend and neighbor Grant Knoll was there. With Grant a suspect in his murder, along with several others with equally good motives for wanting him dead, Claire decides to look into the circumstances of his unfortunate death.

After a long and successful career as a theatre director in Manhattan, fifty-something Claire Gray succumbed to a tempting offer to establish the theatre department at the new and very well-funded Desert Arts College in Palm Springs. It has proven to be an exciting opportunity for Claire but now she's facing the end of her first academic year with a measure of melancholy. Not only is the spring production about to end but her student and clandestine lover, Tanner Griffin, is about to leave school for Hollywood. The person responsible, renowned producer Spencer Wallace, spotted Tanner in an earlier school stage production and signed him to a role in his next film, Photo Flash. Now with the closing performance of the spring production completed, the cast party at Claire's house promises to be a bittersweet affair. What Claire gets, however, is more than she bargained for when, in the middle of the very crowded affair, Spencer Wallace turns up dead in Claire's pool. To make it worse, Claire herself is one of the most probable suspects, with means, motive, and opportunity to have committed the deed. But, Wallace is a man with a past and a reputation, and there are far more than a handful of people with better reasons to wish him harm. Now, with time running short, it falls to Claire to figure out who is really responsible before someone else gets away with the crime and leaves her holding the bag.

The first year in academia ends with a bang-up summer session for theater-director-turned-professor Claire Gray with a new production, a new love, and a dead body. Claire, a former Broadway director and now head of the Theater Department of Desert Arts College in Palm Springs, is running her summer workshop for the first time. The play she will direct is a staged version of the film Rebecca, and playing the female lead is Paige Yeats, daughter of the college's founder and president, D. Glenn Yeats. While rehearsals for the play go well, not everything else does. Yeats's second ex-wife, Felicia, storms into town and makes demands for a Santa Barbara home she received as part of the divorce settlement. When she is discovered poisoned in her hotel room, the real show begins as Claire must wade through a long cast of suspects to find her murderer.