MURDER IN RETIREMENT

Everybody who worked with him, and quite a few people who didn't, would've loved to see J. Turner Redwine dead. So when the corpse who's starring in the climactic scene of the murder-game theatricals that the Redwine Players have brought to Oklahoma's Timberdale Retirement Center turns out to the be the real thing, Deputy Aaron Lassiter has a full slate of candidates (the wife Redwine left behind and reported missing? the long-suffering manager he'd bilked out of a partnership? one of the string of bimbos he'd been toying with?) for the hot seat. Fortunately, Aaron's true love, Laura Michaels, assistant to Timberdale's director, and scatty Timberdale client Maude Thuringer, who just loves mysteries, reprise their detective roles from A Permanent Retirement (1992)—and even stick around for a long, superfluous postlude. Though the confusion of staged and real mysteries seems falsely promising early on, this turns out to be no different from dozens of other staged-murder-turned-real scenarios.