Dress Rehearsal for Murder: Nora Blackwell Cozy Mystery Series

About Dress Rehearsal for Murder: Nora Blackwell Cozy Mystery Series

A hidden painting. A careful lie. A town that keeps its secrets—until Nora Blackwell opens the trunk.

After a whirlwind of unwanted fame from her last brush with true crime, vintage shop owner Nora Blackwell wants nothing more than Millbrook’s ordinary comforts: cinnamon in the air, Ella on the playlist, Gatsby snoring on the velvet settee. But when a legendary local theater clears out its late director’s estate, Nora can’t resist the lure of exquisite costumes—and the locked prop trunk that Gatsby refuses to ignore. Inside waits a small, haunting canvas wrapped with the care of a confession.

It looks like a seventeenth-century Dutch masterwork. It isn’t. And whoever hid it meant for it to be found by no one.

Soon Nora is navigating the theater’s fault lines—an exacting stage manager with a long memory, a poised widow with firm requests, a vanished ingénue who returns with a story she’s held for decades—while a brilliant new ally from the college art department reads the painting’s surface like a diary. Layer by layer, technique gives way to truth: the work is a mid-century forgery of staggering talent, a perfect lever for a man who collected people’s secrets as ruthlessly as he curated their performances. As whispers of old scandals collide with present-day power plays, Nora must decide how to reveal a past that could ruin the living, redeem the silenced, and place a priceless target squarely in her little shop.