Backstage Frequencies

About the Story

A seasoned stage technician investigates the suspicious death of a lighting designer at a small theater and navigates moral choices about exposing the truth. The protagonist's professional skills are central to uncovering and preventing further harm.

Backstage Frequencies opens in the cramped, half-lit world of a small playhouse where Rae Calder, a seasoned stage technician, discovers that a prop collapse that killed the company’s lighting designer may not have been an accident. The narrative sinks into the sensory texture of theater life—burnt rope and lemon oil, jasmine tea on an overturned dressing-room table, a meat-pie cart two streets over and late-night dumpling flags—so that the investigation feels embedded in a living workplace rather than imposed on a set. Rae’s expertise in rigging, winches, and cue timing is not window dressing; it’s the primary lens through which the mystery is examined. She reads metal the way others read faces, traces torque and thread wear as clues, and assembles a practical case out of small physical anomalies and backstage behavior. The story treats tradecraft as a form of moral perception: competence and attention save lives here, and the plot respects the technical realities that make that true. The book’s core tension is moral rather than merely procedural. The company is under economic pressure to open, loyalties run deep, and speaking up could fracture people’s livelihoods. Rae faces a fraught choice between exposing a likely act of sabotage and protecting a fragile community that depends on nightly audiences. Investigation unfolds through hands-on sleuthing—examining altered hardware, tracking timing irregularities in motor controls, logging late-night access—paired with careful, human conversations that reveal private resentments and quiet affection. The novel explores how the labor behind spectacle shapes relationships: small compromises and improvised fixes can be acts of kindness, but they can also hide deliberate risk. Humor is threaded through the darker material in the form of dry backstage jokes, a silly makeshift trophy, and absurd little rituals, which keeps the tone humane and the characters three-dimensional rather than archetypal. This three-part detective piece is compact and deliberately focused: the first section establishes the incident and the world; the middle section maps motives, access, and technical evidence; the finale pivots on a decisive use of Rae’s professional skill that resolves the immediate danger. The pacing privileges practical solutions over melodramatic revelation, and the scenes are written with an insider’s confidence about how theaters actually run—the checks, the petty arguments, the ways people cover for one another. Ideal for readers who value procedural precision, moral ambiguity, and worlds rendered in specific sensory detail, the story offers a tense, technically grounded mystery that keeps human relationships at its center. It’s a good match for anyone intrigued by workplace mysteries where expertise is the means of both understanding and action, and for readers who appreciate atmospheres built from tangible, everyday textures rather than broad abstractions.

Related Stories