Death on the High C's

I liked this book considerably better when I read it in 2007. Eleven years later I found it fairly mean-spirited and the solution weak.
A second-class opera company has been seriously disrupted by the addition of a mezzo soprano who is a vulgar, sex-mad, self-centered shrew of a woman. She is murdered and the search for the killer is on.
This is an early entry from Robert Bernard, and it shows. The characters aren’t well-developed, the humor is scattershot and the plot is far-fetched and dated.
Even so, there are a few signs that Bernard was an author to watch.

when a hated singer dies all assume she was the intended victim