THE FINAL CURTAIN

A former child star, a lonely moor, a series of threats: Do they add up to attention-seeking or something a good deal more sinister?

After finally marrying pathologist Dr. Matthew Levin (A Velvet Scream, 2012), DI Joanna Piercy returns from her exotic honeymoon to find that her colleagues have been plagued by calls from Timony Weeks, once the child star of the very popular 1960s series Butterfield Farm. Timony lives with her day companion, Diana Tong, in an isolated farmhouse, a faithful recreation of the house in the show. She’s been complaining about being spied on and other trivial incidents, but Joanna has a feeling that there’s more to these episodes, especially when Timony’s jewels are stolen and her precious and valuable cat is killed and left hanging on her front door. The answer would seem to lie in Timony’s past, which bears little resemblance to the childhood described by her publicity releases. Her family was very poor, her father a criminal and her marriages failures, beginning with the one to the much older man who played her father on Butterfield Farm. In fact, the segments of the program Joanna watches are distinctly creepy in their echoes of Timony’s early life. Joanna, who has her hands full adjusting to married life and preparing for an unwanted new boss, continues to look into Timony’s past in her spare time until the case explodes when Timony is shot dead, leaving Joanna to use her famous nose to uncover hidden clues to solve the case.

A solid police procedural especially likely to appeal to 1960s nostalgia buffs.