Author:
Writer, singer and actor Joanne Sydney Lessner draws on her own experiences pursuing a performing career in New York City for her acclaimed Isobel Spice Mysteries. With her husband, composer/conductor Joshua Rosenblum, she has co-authored several musicals, including the cult hit Fermat’s Last Tango and Einstein’s Dreams, based on the celebrated novel by Alan Lightman, opening Off Broadway in November 2019. Her play Critical Mass received its Off Broadway premiere in October 2010. Joanne is also a regular contributor to Opera News and a graduate of Yale University.

Dinner theater can be a death sentence. 

Actress Isobel Spice and her best friend Delphi Kramer are thrilled to finally have an opportunity to perform together, even if it’s just a cheesy interactive murder mystery at a judge’s lifetime achievement dinner. But when Isobel’s dramatic death scene is upstaged by a real murder and Delphi is left holding the still-smoking gun, Isobel drops the role of victim and assumes the role of detective. With the help of her precocious brother Percival and her reluctant temp agent James Cooke, Isobel peels back layers of deception to reveal a shocking abuse of power—and no shortage of suspects eager to deliver justice to a man who denied it to so many.

And Justice for Some

Percival looked in dismay at the two lists in Isobel's hands. "They're printouts?"


"I think I'm up to seventy words per minute."


"Because there are two ways to do this. You can type the names into two databases, and then I can cross-check them. Or you can just read out the guest list and I'll look through the prison database. That's the bigger one, right?"


Isobel nodded. "Peter said it goes back more than ten years. It has names, dates, judges, sentences, all that kind of thing." She lobbed her empty coffee cup into the garbage on the far side of the common room in Percival's suite. "What do you think?"


He shrugged. "Up to you. If you type, you have to be sure you're accurate. But if you're reading out the names, you'll have to spell any that are unusual."


"So it really doesn't matter, matter, matter, matter, matter," Isobel sang.


"Then it's probably quicker if we just read them out and check that way."


Chapter 40