DEAD ROOTS
by Nancy J. Cohen
Ghosts and corpses litter the reunion where hairdresser Marla Shore hopes to introduce fiancé Dalton Vail to her fractious family.
Well, what do you know? When Marla (Murder by Manicure, 2001, etc.) takes a few days off from Cut ’N Dye to bring her gorgeous beau for a weekend at Sugar Crest, little does she suspect that her grandparents actually owned the sprawling resort. But that’s exactly what Aunt Polly reveals shortly before she’s found dead in her bedroom in Jasmine Hall. So in between rounds of parading her undraped body before Dalton’s lustful gaze, refereeing fights among her mom Anita, her Uncle Moishe and her cousins Jeff and Lori Levine and listening to her brother’s tales of financial woe, Marla roams the premises. When she tries to extract incriminating information from perky social director Champagne Glass, taciturn groundskeeper Seto Mulch and creepy handyman Harvey Lyle, she gets shoved into a sugar pit for her trouble. Did a supernatural hand engineer her tumble? Dr. Rip Spector, head of the squad of ghostbusters hired by manager George Butler, thinks so. But Marla’s not so sure; there may be something to the rumor that Polly stashed a fortune in jewels someplace in the historic hotel.
As Cohen amply demonstrates, the trouble with love-and-loot fantasies is that they’re really boring, except to lovers with dollar signs in their eyes.