The search for a runaway girl leads Father Brown and his friend Flambeau to a struggling theatre company, replete with backstage gossip, ambitious actors, tempermental divas, mysterious visitors, and murder.
Mundon Mandeville runs a thoroughly disliked repertoire theater company and is murdered inside a windowless room in the building although everyone involved has an alibi. Brown is there as a favor to Flambeau in order to talk an underage seventeen year-old into returning home to her worried parents who don't realize she has lied about her age in order to follow her career as an aspiring actress.—duke1029