Cut, Color, Murder (2022)

I don’t have a bad word to say about the actors in this new Hallmark mystery series. Gonzalo and McPartlin were just fine, and they had a good rapport. But boy oh boy was it dumb. This is a new entry in Hallmark’s spunky female amateur detective line. They usually run their own “womanly” businesses so they can take off whenever one of their acquaintances or customers gets murdered to catch the killer. We have flower shops, book-stores, antique stores, and bakeries. We also have matchmakers(!?), wedding photographers, crossword puzzle editors, and podcast hosts. Strangely, in two of my favorites, Aurora Teagarden and Mystery 101, the spunky female amateur detectives actually have mainstream professions. With the arrival of Cut, Color, and Murder, we now have beauty shop owner. What took them so long?

In this one, Julie is taking her talents to the world of beauty pageants in which her younger sister is a participant and she is doing hair. The bitchy show runner gets murdered and there is plenty of suspects because she was evil to absolutely everyone. Julie is the widow of a policeman who was killed in the line of duty (or was it unsolved cold-blooded murder?). So she has ties to the police department primarily through the chief of police whom is she has wrapped around her little finger. Enter new guy, Ryan McPartlin, handsome hot shot detective who she butts heads with because he is a professional. After Julie meets an anonymous text-messager alone in a spooky abandoned house at night because he/she has info about her husband, it was remote throwing time. Except I had to find it first, because I had already thrown it after all the laws she broke and chain of evidence procedures ignored in the meantime. She is rescued from certain death by Ryan and lets just say this show leaves no cliche unincluded.

We know this is a series because after the mystery is solved we have a bit of a cliffhanger while Julie is having a pow-wow with her dead husband at the cemetery because she has decided to move on (is that something you just decide to do?). We know that there is going to be an over-arching mystery of her trying to solve her husbands murder and getting into all kinds of trouble. Not a spoiler, because I’m not psychic, but I predict that the murderer of her husband turns out to be the indulgent good-guy/father-figure/police chief many episodes hence.