Amy Winslow (Jill Wagner) teaches crime mystery fiction at a college following her famous father&#39;s footsteps. Her student Lacey seems distracted. Lacey&#39;s boyfriend Rex has gone missing. Detectives Travis Cole (Kristoffer Polaha) and Tate are investigating the theft of an experimental plant from the college. Claire Tate is Amy&#39;s former students. When Lacey also goes missing, the brilliantly deductive Amy sets off to do her own investigating.<br/><br/>This is a Hallmark mystery. I&#39;m not sure if this is going to be a series. These things have a tendency to sprout so that&#39;s certainly possible. Wagner and Polaha have passable chemistry. It&#39;s not romantic level but could rise up to bantering level if the writing could take a step up. The &#39;stay-out-of-the-police-investigation&#39; is certainly a tired trope. I&#39;m glad they get over that quickly and calling out the trope themselves. It does show that there are brains behind the writing. They seem to be veteran TV mystery show writers but they can still do better. The production is nothing cinematic but it is Hallmark level. The mystery writing keeps it compelling even at a lower grade level.

As in the case of the Hallmark mysteries this is lacking as much as the others.Acting is terrible and stilted . Responses to dialogue between characters is stale.<br/><br/>This is not as bad as Aurora Teagarden , but almost

&quot;I&#39;d really like your help and advice on this murder mystery,&quot; said no cop ever in real life. But in every Hallmark mystery there&#39;s are more than a couple of conversations between the police officer (or a retired cop) and the cute, vivacious, perfectly coiffed lady detective, who, carefully following in the pattern of Jessica Fletcher and Miss Marple before her, assumes that she&#39;s indispensible to the case. The words,&quot;Back off&quot;, or &quot;Not your job&quot;, or &quot;OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE&quot; seem to mean nothing. Those crazy bureaucratic (trained, armed, experienced) cops - what do they know - even the good-looking ones? She&#39;ll show them, Bud! &#39;Cause gosh, he&#39;ll rescue her at the end, just when the real killer has pulled the gun! Or the knife!Ok, that being said, these Mystery 101 mysteries (this is for the four current ones) are some of the best of the Hallmark Mysteries. The two leads do actually try to solve the mystery, after the obligatory conversation noted above. I&#39;ve guessed the villain in several but it&#39;s not obvious, and the misdirections and red herrings are well done. It&#39;s as Hallmark-y as all getout (partly a commercial for beautiful Canada, fine with me, no PDAs, lots of unrequited &quot;like&quot;) but the mysteries are good, and I actually enjoy Jill Wagner&#39;s lecturettes about crime fiction. The rest of the cast a good job with the somewhat predictable lines they&#39;re given.