When mystery bookstore owner Annie Laurance is invited to stage a Mystery Night for the annual antebellum house tour of the Historical Preservation Society of Chastain, South Carolina, she instead finds herself the leading lady in a flesh-and-blood drama. The play's the thing wherein the curtain falls on mean-spirited grande dame Corinne Webster. While jeweled fingers point, accusing Annie of murder, the perpetrator lurks within the genteel cast of Murder-Most-Make-Believe...and the murder weapon is one of the props.

In the tight-laced society of Chastain, Annie is guilty until proven innocent. With her fiance, Max Darling, Annie pieces together evidence to clear her name- until her chief witness is murdered. Now it will take all her sleuthing skills to discover the evil in the heart of Chastain's Beautiful People.