Mystery Woman: Sing Me a Murder

Samantha Kinsey runs a bookstore that also serves as a gathering place for her mystery-reading friends, and her life gets more complicated when the nostalgic folk group The Ramblers asks to perform a charity concert there. Philby, Samantha's enigmatic bookstore colleague and occasional technical helper, is already distracted by the death of a former coworker and by his own secretive reassessment of life, which only deepens his mystique. The concert setup quickly becomes a small-town spectacle, especially when Samantha learns the band members are old friends with a lot of history and a very loose relationship with time, money, and one another. The evening takes a dark turn when the band's manager, Jason Hurd, is found dead at the Bell B&B before the concert can properly begin. Chief Connors takes charge and immediately treats The Ramblers, especially Carly McGuire and her husband Steven, as suspects. Carly becomes overwhelmed and even confesses in a moment of panic, but Samantha recognizes that the case is more complicated than a single guilty conscience. Meanwhile, another suspicious visitor, record producer Marshall Bolen, leaves his print in Jason's room and becomes an early focus of the investigation. As Samantha keeps asking questions, she and Philby dig into Bolen's background and discover that he is actually Tom Brody, an ex-con with a record of money laundering and other white-collar crimes. Another man tied to him, Oliver Murdoch, turns out to be a career criminal with a history of bank robbery and a distinctive one-blue-eye/one-brown-eye description that matches the mysterious men Bonnie saw. The pieces begin to align with a larger scheme: Jason has been using The Ramblers' charity tour as cover for a scam, and the concerts themselves line up with a series of bank robberies in the towns they visit. At the same time, the band's private life unravels. Carly reveals a painful secret about her son Harmony: Steven is not his biological father, and Dan Howard is. The confession explains years of guilt, resentment, and tension inside the group, while also helping Samantha understand why Steven is so angry and controlling. The emotional fallout makes everyone look more suspicious, but Samantha keeps separating hurt feelings from hard evidence, pushing past red herrings and the police chief's rush to arrest the nearest available band member. The final breakthrough comes when Samantha and Philby realize that Steven and Jason were working together on the tour scam, but Steven believed Jason was cheating him and withholding his share. Jason's murder is not the act of a random outsider; Steven kills him in anger and revenge, then tries to deflect blame onto the others. With the truth exposed, Connors arrests Steven, the fraud collapses, and the surviving Ramblers are left to reckon with both the murder and the damage their past has caused. The mystery closes with Samantha satisfied that the case is solved and Philby still keeping just enough of himself hidden to remain intriguing.