Dressed to Kill

Drag queens are about to sashay into a conservative village, and the local dominoes competition has a date clash. In a village where the biggest annual event is a dominoes competition, that is not a small problem. They arrive with the best of intentions and find themselves at the centre of a local row. Lois Springfield, the parish chairwoman, has made no secret of her hostility to the show. Then she is found dead in the village theatre, and the first assumption is that her hostility got her killed. Barnaby and Winter take the case and quickly find the motives are more tangled than the clash of events suggests.

The detectives work through the theatre crowd, and the resentment around the show is only one thread. The killer had a more personal reason, and the dominoes fixture is the least of the village's problems. Nobody at the theatre saw anything, which in Midsomer usually means everyone saw something. Underneath the costumes runs the usual Midsomer machinery, all old secrets and small resentments that have grown in village halls for years. The case runs on performance, and somewhere in the cast list somebody stopped acting.

Caroline Graham and Maria Ward wrote it, Leon Lopez and Paul Gibson directed. Neil Dudgeon's Barnaby and Nick Hendrix's Winter lead the case, with Fiona Dolman as Sarah Barnaby and Annette Badland as Fleur Perkins. Clare Hingott plays Lois Springfield, Felix Kai is Malik Payne, Tessie Orange-Turner is Evelyn Hardy, Stewart Wright is Shawn Dawlish, Nigel Lindsay is Nigel Bellamy and Baxter Westby is Rocco Templeton.

And there is something properly Midsomer about the set-up. The village cannot decide whether it is more outraged by the drag queens or by the disruption to its dominoes fixture. The murder itself is personal. The show was just where it happened. The village put on its best show anyway, as villages do.