LIGHTS, CAMERA, MURDER!

A pet chef’s dream job is derailed by murder.

Kitty Karlyle, who makes gourmet meals for the pets of Hollywood’s rich and sometime famous, has a shot at hosting the planned television show The Pampered Pet. At the studio, Kitty (Dishing Up Death, 2005) immediately takes to ditzy hair and makeup artist Fran Earhart and finds a friend in her high school classmate, cameraman David Biggins. Although she’s supernervous, the pilot shoot goes well until Gretchen Corbett, the show’s producer, is found stabbed to death with one of Kitty’s knives. When Kitty’s policeman fiance, Jack Young, arrives on the scene, he’s sure that Kitty’s innocent. Less convinced is his strikingly attractive partner, Elin Nordstrom, whose closeness to Jack raises Kitty’s hackles and makes her determined to find the killer herself. She has a helper in Fran, whom Gretchen had just fired. Gretchen was not the most popular person in a town filled with bitchy back-stabbers, and Kitty uncovers a confusing number of suspects, including Gretchen’s two former husbands and two children of those marriages. The sleuths snoop and pry, making someone nervous enough to threaten them, but Kitty, still annoyed with Jack, won’t let anything stand in the way of finding the culprit before the police.

A run-of-the-mill cozy with many too many confusing storylines.