CAST ON, KILL OFF

A Fort Connor bride’s path to the hymeneal altar is impeded by several crises that befall her friends, her fellow knitters and her seamstress, including the latter’s murder.

Kelly Flynn might have known it was a bad sign when Zoe Yeager finished sewing the perfect bridal gown for her friend Megan Smith and all the bridesmaids’ equally fetching dresses a full three weeks before the wedding. Item: Megan’s sister Janet, her matron of honor, can’t fit into her dress because she’s suddenly pregnant. Item: The triangular wedding shawl Kelly’s knitting to match all the other bridesmaids’ shawls (pattern included, along with three recipes) keeps shrinking on one side. Item: Zoe is shot to death shortly after finally leaving her abusive husband, Oscar. The Fort Connor police naturally fasten on Oscar as their prime suspect, but Kelly, whose accounting business never seems to engage her full attention (Unraveled, 2011, etc.), wonders about Leann O’Hara, the rival seamstress who burst into Zoe’s class the night she died to accuse her of stealing a prizewinning bridal-gown pattern from Leann. And there are other problems to worry about too. Will Zoe’s sister, Vera Wilcott, be able to rescue both Megan’s wedding and Zoe’s business? Will Kelly’s sometime boyfriend, architect Steve Townsend, ever make the move from friends-again to lovers-once-more? And who’ll win Kelly’s climactic showdown with a blond hussy that seems to have been sneaked in by some rewrite man who hopes the movie will feature a knockdown bar fight?

Not to worry: Megan’s wedding goes off without a hitch; Kelly gets her man, or vice versa; and somewhere along the line the cops arrest Zoe’s killer. Whew.