When a wealthy donor drops dead at her charity gala, Fox Theater fundraiser Bunny Beaudoin finds herself thrust into a murder investigation that threatens everything she's built. Teaming up with enigmatic private investigator Dash O'Neill, Bunny discovers the victim was poisoned—and he's not the killer's first target. As bodies pile up and the theater's…

Bunny Beaudoin scores the fundraising get of the season — pharmaceutical magnate Glen Valentino, coming to the Fox Theater’s gala — and spends approximately forty-eight hours riding that high before Carol calls to deliver the news that Glen has been seated directly next to his ex-wife. There is no fix. The place cards are already at the printer. Bunny puts on a very expensive dress, gives herself a pep talk in a mirror, and walks out to greet her guests with the energy of someone who has absolutely not accepted that this evening is going to be a disaster.

The Fox Theater’s big fundraising gala is going remarkably well, right up until it isn’t. Bunny runs the room like a professional, keeps Glen Valentino and his ex-wife from each other’s throats through sheer force of charm, and watches a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar bidding war unfold in real time. Then Harold Finch, former business associate and man with a famously unhappy stomach, takes a fall he does not get up from — and Bunny’s evening takes a turn that no amount of event insurance covers.

Bunny and Fenelope spend their Sunday morning in the least glamorous place imaginable — a fluorescent-lit medical examiner’s office — where they learn that Harold Finch had more than bad luck in his system the night he died. The word “belladonna” gets dropped like a stone, the police are apparently useless, and then a very tall man with very good cheekbones materializes in the parking lot to make everything significantly more complicated.

Bunny Beaudoin walks into the world’s most depressing detective office and sits across from Dashiell O’Neill, who is annoyingly attractive and entirely too calm about the fact that someone is quietly poisoning their way through Glen Valentino’s inner circle. She came to dismiss him. She leaves with his personal number and a growing suspicion that sensible left the building the night Harold Finch died.

Bunny Beaudoin has been a detective since age nine — ask her father's Montblanc pen — and that instinct kicks into high gear when she pays a carefully casual visit to board member Siobhan Reid under the guise of donor relations. Over chamomile tea in a sunroom that has never once hosted a problem, Siobhan confirms exactly what Bunny suspected: Carissa gave Glen and Harold the same medication that night, same gesture, same motion, like she'd done it a hundred times before. Oh, and Carissa has abruptly canceled their lunch plans for an unscheduled trip to the Bahamas. Bunny is back in her car and dialing Dash before the tea goes cold — and by the time she hangs up, she's pretty sure the black sedan that just pulled out behind her is not a coincidence.

Bunny never makes it to her meeting with Dash — Police Chief Lancaster intercepts her three blocks away, hauls her into an interrogation room that looks exactly like every interrogation room on television, and proceeds to make her feel personally responsible for the body count. Rather than backing down, Bunny negotiates herself into an unofficial partnership with the department, because apparently that’s just the kind of person she is now. Detective Ramirez slips her a parting gift on her way out: Harold Finch was days away from testifying against Glen Valentino in a federal price-fixing investigation. Bunny takes this straight to Dash, who is waiting among the mothballs and Elizabethan ruffs of the Fox’s costume storage — their new headquarters — where the two of them construct a very compelling theory about Carissa Levinson. Then Bunny’s phone buzzes. It’s an email. From Carissa Levinson.

Bunny receives an email from prime suspect Carissa Levinson that is somehow more alarming than a threat — it’s a meeting request. Before the six o’clock Zoom call, Bunny shows up to Dash’s office with Thai takeout and enough nervous energy to power a small city, and somewhere between the pad thai and the spring rolls, the two of them accidentally have a real conversation. Backstories are shared. Walls come down slightly. The tension gets thick enough to cut with chopsticks. Then the laptop chimes, Carissa appears on screen against a suspiciously cinematic Nassau sunset, and the interrogation begins — except it’s unclear pretty quickly who’s interrogating whom.

Bunny and Dash have a Zoom call with prime suspect Carissa Levinson — who is, naturally, parked on a beach in Nassau with a rum punch and a sunset that looks aggressively staged. Carissa skips the pleasantries and goes straight to the bombshell: she didn’t kill anyone, she’s being framed, and the real target was never Harold Finch. It was always Glen Valentino. She’s either the most convincing liar Dash has ever met in fifteen years of investigations, or she’s just handed them the key to the whole case. Bunny can’t decide which is scarier — and when the call cuts out, Carissa leaves behind one warning that refuses to stop echoing: be careful who you trust at the Fox.

Bunny and Dash walk into Police Chief Lancaster’s office and walk out with something they didn’t expect: permission to keep investigating. Sort of. Lancaster is skeptical, sharp-tongued, and clearly fantasizing about early retirement in Cancun, but she’s pragmatic enough to know that a development director and a PI can go places her badges can’t. Detective Ramirez is assigned as their official babysitter — and immediately breaks rank in the parking lot with a detail Lancaster didn’t want shared. The wire transfer count is off, and the timeline doesn’t fit. With a new lead and a bottle of good scotch as their calling card, Bunny and Dash head to the suburbs to pay an unannounced visit to one very talkative auctioneer.

Bunny Beaudoin and her film professor best friend Violet are deep into a Sunday night Mahjong tournament — with suspicious results — when the conversation takes a sharp turn from cocktails to corpses. Glen Valentino is dead, Carissa’s alibi is ironclad, the pill theory has completely collapsed, and Dash has gone frustratingly, mysteriously silent. With the whole investigation back at square one, Violet drags Bunny back from the edge of a breakdown with a masterclass in classic cinema logic: sometimes the most important clue is the dog that didn’t bark. Bunny walks away with a plan, a mahjong loss, and a very dangerous question taking shape.

Dash has been awake for approximately three days, looks like it, and has chosen today to finally come clean: Glen Valentino — the dead man at the center of everything — was his client. He hired Dash to investigate the earlier deaths, fired him when results were slow, and then inconveniently turned up murdered himself. Bunny listens, goes very still, and then exits the restaurant at a speed that suggests she is done. The argument continues in the parking lot, in the full heat of the afternoon sun, in front of at least one alarmed elderly couple. Dash admits he was a coward. Bunny tells him their partnership is finished and gets in her car. He stands there watching her go. She does not look back.

Bunny is home, she is in her hoodie, she is eating pasta directly from the pan, and she is delivering a full trial prosecution against Dashiell O’Neill to her golden retriever, Mr. Darcy, who is doing his best. Then Dash shows up at her door — freshly barbered, holding a bakery box, looking annoyingly good — with homemade tea cakes and a reasonably sincere apology. Bunny lets him in, mostly for the tea cakes. They argue, they make up, and somewhere between the second cookie and a charged moment that Mr. Darcy helpfully interrupts, they agree to break into Glen Valentino’s mansion after midnight to find out what that empty paint can was hiding. Partners again. Possibly something more. Definitely something inadvisable.

Bunny Beaudoin — development director, rule-follower, woman who sets seventeen alarms — commits her first felony. She and Dash break into Glen Valentino’s mansion at midnight, scale a magnolia tree in black leggings, and work their way through a house that is significantly more threatening in the dark. What they find stops them cold: fresh white paint over the gallery baseboards, concealing a bloodstain large enough to matter. Glen didn’t die in his study. He died in the gallery, and someone moved the body, staged the suicide, and painted over the evidence. They also clock one suspiciously empty alcove — the only bare pedestal in a room full of art. Then headlights sweep across the windows, and suddenly they’re climbing back out through a laundry room window with a security patrol on their heels. Dash catches Bunny on the other side of the fence. They stand there a beat too long before letting go.

After a night of breaking into mansions and discovering blood under fresh paint, Bunny and Dash make a detour to his apartment for bourbon and literary debate that escalates, predictably, into something significantly more interesting than Chandler vs. noir. The responsible development director who has never once been late to work wakes up at 9:47 AM in a private investigator’s bed, absolutely loses her mind, and attempts to put on her leggings while Carol calls in a panic about an “active lobby.” Dash watches the chaos with the calm of a man who has absolutely no regrets. Bunny kisses him goodbye, tells herself it’s complicated, and heads back to the Fox to find out exactly how bad things have gotten.

The Fox Theater is under siege — seven news vans, one very confused contractor named Tommy, and zero sign of Fenelope Wilde, who has apparently decided that today, of all days, is a great time to barricade herself in her office and pretend she doesn’t exist. Carol pulls Bunny aside to report that their boss has gone full control freak: locking down donor records, hoarding the gala guest list in a personal safe, cutting everyone out of meetings except herself. Bunny does the math, doesn’t like the answer, and quietly asks Carol to start paying very close attention to Fenelope’s every move. Then she retreats to her office, pulls up her laptop, and starts wondering whether the killer has had a key to the Fox this whole time.

Bunny and Dash have a morning. One that involves coffee, sheets, and absolutely zero professional conduct — which, honestly, fair. They do eventually get out of bed long enough to hatch a plan involving the Fox board meeting and one Dr. Elaine Cashler, the city's medical examiner, who Bunny goes to visit alone and finds to be warm, charming, full of gardening opinions, and— quite frankly— terrifying. Cashler sends her off with a packet of tomato seeds and a cryptic smile that does not reach her eyes.

Bunny Beaudoin has one conversation with the city’s medical examiner and immediately needs a lie-down. Dr. Cashler is charming! She has plants! She talks about gardening! And Bunny, consummate professional, falls for every second of it. Private investigator Dash O’Neill, meanwhile, has been in his office doing what he does best: being suspicious of people who are suspiciously nice. A little digging turns into a lot of digging, and what he unearths has a name — Agios Clinics. So naturally, they have to do what they do best: a classic breaking and entering. Until someone starts to walk up the stairs with a pistol and an axe to grind.