Rehearsed to Death by Frank Anthony Polito

Available May 23, 2023

Rating: 4 stars

PJ and JP are back! With their Domestic Partners reality show on hiatus, the men are focusing on the production of PJ's play, Blue Tuesday, at a local theater. With hopes of taking the show to Broadway, the theater has brought in an outsider to direct. Xander Sherwood Deva turns out to be more of a liability than an asset and when they walk into the theater late one night to find him dead they don't believe the police when they say it was an accident.

I loved the first book in this series. I love the characters, I love the setting, but I didn't feel that this book was as polished as the first. While the story was great and seeing the behind-the-scenes drama of a local play production was interesting, it didn't quite hit me the same way as the first did. There were a few shifts in focus that just didn't quite work with the first person perspective. I also found the ending a bit confusing because it's told in the fashion of the movie Clue (which is fun, but hard to follow). While I didn't enjoy this one quite as much as the first, I definitely enjoyed it and look forward to continuing the series.

Overall, I will say this: based on a lot of the reviews that I've read for this book and for the first book in this series, I think people picked it up thinking it's a LGBTQ+ book. It is, but it's not. More accurately it's a cozy mystery with LGBTQ+ characters. If you don't like cozy mysteries, you won't like this book. If you're looking for some deep, moving fiction novel, you won't find it here because that's not what cozy mysteries are all about. If you're a fan of cozy mysteries, you'll enjoy this book. If you're not a fan of cozy mysteries, don't read this (and certainly don't read it and then leave it a scathing review because you expected it to be something it's not, that wouldn't be fair).

Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC.