Jude Grove
The Gilded Wren Mysteries · Book three
Formal Night, Fatal Morning
The theatre has no seats in it. Two hundred and fourteen of them were bolted down and were sold in May to a cinema in Panama, and the daily programme now calls the room Standing Social.
So formal night is six hundred and nineteen people in evening dress, standing on a slope, under one follow-spot that works. At a quarter to ten the room goes completely dark, and stays dark for eleven minutes, and everybody has a lovely time. In the morning a man is found at the bottom of it.
On a ship where everything breaks, a power failure is the least suspicious thing that could possibly happen — which is the difficulty, because this one took out two things that share no wiring at all.
Nobody announced it. Nobody ever does not announce it.
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