When Fenella learns that her friend, Breesha, is going to be in a play, she reserves a box at the theater for herself and her friends. The show turns out to be a complicated mess, but even worse is the body surrounded by blood in the next box.

Fenella is relieved to learn that the body is just a mannequin, but things take a more dramatic turn the next day at a different theater as a man falls to his death just before the curtain is meant to go up.

Threatening letters, a reclusive playwright, and quite possibly the worst play ever written combine to complicate Fenella’s life.

Can she help her boyfriend, CID Inspector Daniel Robinson, work out who is behind the anonymous letters? Can they find the person responsible for the deadly accident? And is there any way that Three Gentlewomen from Bologna will ever make any sense at all?