FATAL FESTIVAL DAYS

Solving a murder while planning a winter festival isn’t half as much fun as solving two murders.

Struggling with the minutely detailed preparations for Metamora, Indiana’s winter festival, organizer Cameron Cripps Hayman labors in vain to make everybody happy. In a place focused on small-town concerns, that means wrestling with problems like coming up with a cat-focused event that will assuage the anger of those who find the proposed dog sled races too canine-centric. Cameron has no idea how Mayor Soapy Savant manages to find solutions that will please people, like getting grouchy Phillis Landow to grant the festival access to her land in exchange for the honor of co-hosting with former Olympian David Dixon. The original plan to hold the downhill skiing event on Clayton Banks’ land is upended by the discovery that Clayton is dead and maybe murdered. It’s definitely an inconvenience for festival planning, but Cameron also knows it might provide a good opportunity to thrust herself and her Action Agency, a crew of citizens who enjoys the odd local mystery (Canal Days Calamity, 2017, etc.), into the investigation, much to the chagrin of Ben, her police officer husband. Cameron’s luck gets simultaneously better and worse when another festival participant is knocked off. Now she must do more planning to make the event not only a success, but a distraction, apart from all the deaths, which don’t seem worth mulling over too much. A slew of quickly introduced townsfolk make up the pool of suspects that conceal the killer, but the only mystery that stands out is the question of where Mike, the town duck, has run off to.

Fast-moving follies take the place of character development in Blair’s antic series, which focuses on forward action but not much else.