The Mummers, live (and perhaps are willing to die) for a few hours of glory every New Year's Day. The famous Mummers' Parade is an extravaganza that draws enormous crowds who cheer through chattering teeth, as more than thirty thousand clowns, string bands, and fancy brigades strut their stuff up Broad Street. But this year, while the music blares and the Mummers dance, a reveling Pierrot suddenly sinks to the ground, shot dead. Amanda is, at first, only a horrified spectator. But when the prime suspect--her friend and fellow teacher at Philly Prep--falsely claims to have been with her at the time of the murder, Amanda can no longer stay on the sidelines. Is the murder a flare-up of deadly rivalries? Is it connected with the disappearance, the week before Christmas, of another Mummer, the heir to a meat-packing family? Does someone disapprove of the Mummers' feathers, sequins, and string bands? And why is no one in the tight-knit world Amanda investigates willing to tell the truth about anything? With Amanda on the scene, the who in whodunit doesn't stay secret for long. In The Mummers' Curse, Gillian Roberts is, as always, at the head of the parade.
Philadelphia's New Year's Day Mummers' Parade, a splashy, fiercely competitive affair, turns murderous in yet another funny Philly puzzler for schoolteacher Amanda Pepper. Amanda watches as a costumed Pierrot collapses in the middle of the parade - shot dead. Vincent Devaney, a Mummer who teaches with Amanda at Philly Prep, is prime suspect. An old friend of the dead man, Vincent had also been his rival for the leadership of their "Fancy Club," one of the organizations in the secretive world of Mummerdom. Complicating matters is the fact that Vincent falsely claims he was with Amanda during the shooting. Amanda's significant other, homicide detective K.C. Mackenzie, trusts her sufficiently to ask her to chat with Vincent to find out "what's really going down." But after a gun surfaces in Amanda's voluminous purse, and the corpse of another Mummer turns up in an abandoned factory, even Mackenzie's dinner conversation crosses the line from chit-chat to interrogation. Roberts effectively balances the subject of pride, Philadelphia's local color and Amanda's mounting problems.