Guest Sleuth Spotlight: Sloan Foster—Cue the Catastrophe
Meet Sloan Foster — author of Cue the Catastrophe. Vintage costumes, a chandelier death played for laughs, and a nine-pound Chihuahua named Taco.
Series: A Marnie Devlin Cozy Mystery
The Book: Marnie Devlin retired from teaching English so she could spend her afternoons with her vintage costume collection, her nine-pound Chihuahua, and the quiet pleasure of saying yes when the local theater asks for help. When the Players Community Theater requests a few weeks of period costumes for their spring production, she expects sawdust, slapstick, and good company. What she gets is a director crushed by his own chandelier — in front of an audience that, for several long seconds, thinks the death is part of the bit.
The Players Community Theater is the kind of small-town stage where everyone has a history with everyone else, and the dead director was, as the audience is about to discover, notoriously cruel. Marnie's official police consultant badge gets her past the velvet rope. Her instinct for spotting what doesn't fit gets her past the cast's polished alibis. Taco — her Chihuahua, who has never once been wrong about a person — gets her past the rest. The trio start pulling threads, and the threads do not lead where anyone expected.
The scorned actress, with a shattered engagement and a freshly padded bank account, looks suspiciously like a suspect. The silver-haired theater legend, whose life's work was stolen by the dead director, looks suspiciously like a better one. Then a second body turns up. Then evidence appears in Marnie's own boutique trunk — the kind that does not arrive there by accident. Someone closer than Marnie thought is watching every move she makes. Taco knew first. Marnie just has to catch up before the killer takes the final curtain call.
What Readers Are Saying: Just launched May 8, 2026.
“A retired English teacher, a community-theater chandelier death the audience mistakes for part of the bit, vintage costumes with secrets in the trunk, and a nine-pound Chihuahua named Taco who is never, ever wrong about a person. Consider this your spring-afternoon-on-the-porch recommendation. ”
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