Made Up To Kill: Kelley Roos’s Broadway Mystery Introduces Jeff and Haila Troy

A Broadway opening night gives Kelley Roos’s Made Up To Kill a stage full of nerves, disguises and possible motives. The first book in the Jeff and Haila Troy series begins with a threatened performance, turns quickly to murder, and gives its amateur sleuths room to make the investigation as entertaining as the crime is puzzling.

Haila Rogers is anticipating the debut of Green Apples, a British comedy of manners opening on Broadway. The show’s star, Carol Blanton, is staying with Haila, but an attack of laryngitis leaves the production facing a last-minute change. Carol’s understudy is ready to take her place. Then Carol recovers in time to perform—and someone poisons her.

Carol survives. The danger doesn’t end there: before long, a dead body is found wearing her cloak. The garment ties the crime to the actress and her circle while leaving room to wonder who, exactly, was meant to be in harm’s way. Haila’s fiancé, Jeff Troy, has detective ambitions, and the pair soon find themselves racing around New York to identify the killer before another attack.

A mystery built around the theater

The play’s opening creates a compact, lively setting for the story. A star, an understudy, a performance under pressure and a distinctive piece of clothing all give the crime its theatrical frame. That setup offers the reader several details to weigh without making the plot feel like a simple puzzle about one poisoned actress. As the reviewer observes, the book has more than one level of plotting, and its misdirection helps keep the solution out of reach.

The reviewer had expected the mystery to follow familiar lines, comparing that assumption to Peril At End House. Instead, the story led them away from the answer for much of the book. That surprise is a particular pleasure here: the opening gives readers a clear set of questions, but the reviewer’s account suggests that the clues don’t point as plainly as they first appear to. For readers who enjoy trying to solve a case while a book keeps shifting their suspicions, that balance may be part of the appeal.

Jeff and Haila set the tone

This is the first appearance of Jeff and Haila as a series couple. They aren’t married at this point, and their relationship gives the investigation a second source of momentum alongside the clues. Jeff’s wish to play detective puts him in motion; Haila is part of the action rather than a distant observer. The reviewer found that the two play well off one another, helping the novel’s comic passages feel connected to its characters.

The humor did take some getting used to. The reviewer generally prefers British Golden Age mysteries and sometimes finds American comic crime too detached from their sense of reality. Here, the wisecracks were an initial hurdle, though several landed, and the book’s buoyant mood ultimately won them over. One moment that captures the couple’s give-and-take comes when Jeff slaps Haila because she is in shock. Her response is to punch him in the stomach. The reviewer treats the exchange as a punchline, and it hints at a relationship built on quick reactions as much as affection.

That comic energy is a matter of taste, and the review doesn’t present every joke as a sure thing. Readers who enjoy fast banter may settle into the rhythm sooner; those who prefer a more restrained mystery might need time to adjust. Still, the reviewer’s experience changed as the book went on: the humor began to work, and Jeff and Haila became a major reason the story felt like such a treat.

A promising start to a hard-to-find series

The reviewer’s enthusiasm comes with a practical frustration. After choosing Made Up To Kill for a book club, they found an affordable copy through Abebooks, then managed to find a copy of the fourth book. The rest of the series, they say, has been difficult to locate at prices they could afford. That scarcity shapes the final impression: discovering a mystery they loved also left them wanting access to more of the couple’s adventures.

For a reader approaching the series, Made Up To Kill offers a useful starting point: it introduces Jeff and Haila, establishes their comic chemistry and builds a layered mystery around a Broadway production. The reviewer’s reservations about some of the jokes are part of the recommendation’s value, since they make clear that the book’s tone may not suit everyone equally. But the combination of a theatrical opening, lively leads and a solution that eluded the reviewer makes this first outing easy to recommend to readers curious about classic American crime fiction. Finding the next installment may be the harder part.