Plays and Parfaits by Maya Corrigan #Giveaway #SpotlightSunday

Yesterday, November 25th, was the 71st anniversary of the longest running stage play ever. Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap opened in London in 1952 and is still going strong. Yesterday was also National Parfait Day. The Mousetrap and parfait are joined in my latest mystery, A Parfait Crime.

 Photo by Ji-Elle, CC BY-SA 4.0  via Wikimedia Commons

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Last year my spotlight focused on my writing journey from the first novel I wrote at age thirteen to my mystery series published decades later. A year after I wrote that novel, I had my first taste of live professional theater. As a high school freshman, I went on a class trip to the Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut. Reading Macbeth for English class hadn’t turned me into a Shakespeare fan, but seeing Twelfth Night in a place resembling Shakespeare’s Globe theater did the trick. The language I’d found hard to read was easy to understand when spoken by the actors. The stage set was magical. And the play was very funny.

I grew up a subway ride away from Broadway, but tickets for shows then, as now, were expensive. For a while in high school, I had a well-heeled boyfriend who sprang for Broadway tickets, but most of the plays I saw as a teenager featured students playing the roles. The two I remember best were Murder in a Nunnery, performed at my girls high school, and Twelve Angry Men, at the nearby boys high school. Both dealt with murder, one similar to a cozy mystery and the other a gripping legal drama. Since then, I’ve seen many plays focused on crime and justice. The one that made the biggest impression was Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap.

When I was twenty, I saw Christie’s play in London. It's set in a snowbound country guesthouse, where the lodgers and owners are trapped with a murderer in their midst. I was on edge for much of the play, my heart racing, waiting for the killer to strike again. The surprise ending thrilled me. I liked the show so much that when I was in London five years later, I saw it again. Though I remembered the plot, including who the culprit was, the play was still gripping and enjoyable. The Mousetrap isn’t a whodunit that challenges your puzzle-solving skills. Rather, it stirs up fear and evokes sympathy. It’s an emotional ride punctuated by sound effects, music, and, at key moments, sudden total darkness in the theater. 

You don’t have to travel to London to enjoy Christie’s play. It’s often performed by school and community groups, like the one in my latest Five-Ingredient Mystery. A Parfait Crime centers on rehearsals for an amateur production of The Mousetrap. ​​My book doesn’t contain any spoilers about Christie’s play or reveal her culprit.  My sleuths, café manager Val and her energetic Granddad, are in the cast of Christie's play. When the amateur actors take a break during rehearsals, they enjoy tea and Granddad's parfaits, and they ponder how to catch a killer who has committed a perfect crime. 

Check out the yummy parfait recipe I shared here a few months ago.

To enter a drawing for a copy of A Parfait Crime, leave a comment by November 29 about your favorite parfait or your favorite mystery by Agatha Christie. 

Please include your email address so I can contact you if you’re the winner. The giveaway is open to anyone with a US address. 

A PARFAIT CRIME: Five-Ingredient Mystery #9

Set in a quaint Chesapeake Bay town, the latest novel in Maya Corrigan’s Five-Ingredient Mysteries brings back café manager Val Deniston and her recipe columnist grandfather – a sleuthing duo that shares a house, a love of food and cooking, and a knack for catching killers.

At the site of a fatal blaze, Val’s boyfriend, a firefighter trainee, is shocked to learn the victim is known to him, a woman named Jane who belonged to the local Agatha Christie book club—and was rehearsing alongside Val’s grandfather for an upcoming Christie play being staged for charity. Just as shocking are the skeletal remains of a man found in Jane’s freezer. Who is he and who put him on ice?

 After Val is chosen to replace Jane in the play, the cast gathers at Granddad’s house to get to work—and enjoy his five-ingredient parfaits—but all anyone can focus on is the bizarre real-life mystery. When it’s revealed that Jane’s death was due to something other than smoke inhalation, Val and Granddad retrace the victim’s final days. As they dig into her past life, their inquiry leads them to a fancy new spa in town—where they discover that Jane wasn’t the only one who had a skeleton in the cooler.

 

Library Journal: "Thanks to Val’s and her grandfather’s talent for exposing the truth, even a “perfect crime” will be uncovered...a satisfying read and a riveting murder mystery with a sweet ending."

 

Read an excerpt and see where to buy A Parfait Crime  

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