Alison Sweeney, the executive producer and star of the “Hannah Swensen Mystery” films, confirmed another installment of the TV movie series for Hallmark Movies & Mysteries on Wednesday, two days before the premiere of the latest film “Carrot Cake Murder: A Hannah Swensen Mystery.”
The newly announced film will be based on “A Zest for Death: A Hannah Swensen Mystery.”
“I love this book from Joanne Fluke and its adaptation for TV because the mystery really leans into Hannah’s family dynamics, her sleuthing skills and her romantic relationships,” said Sweeney.
Hannah’s mother Delores (Barbara Niven) will return in this next film to find a dead body of a homeowner while on a house-hunting mission for her sister Michelle. Hannah will team up with her friend Norman (Gabriel Hogan) when her intuition tells her something is off in the victim’s house.
“This one requires really more of Hannah’s skills of — her superpower is her gut instinct and her way of communicating with people that gets them to confide in her and tell her things and how she notices things that are misplaced or out of the ordinary or not how it was last time,” Sweeney told TVInsider. She just has a way about her really picking up on the little details, the nuances. And I think this next mystery is going to have some fun elements like that that are there for the audience to notice, too, if you pay attention. So at the end you’ll be like, “Oh, it’s right there in front of me and I didn’t see it!”
“Carrot Cake Murder,” the latest installment based on Joanne Fluke’s novels, airs on Hallmark Movies & Mysteries May 19 at 9 p.m. Eastern. It marks the second film since Sweeney acquired the TV rights to Fluke’s books.
The discovery of a skeleton in the rubble of a building undergoing renovation hints that one of Lake Eden’s residents has literal skeletons in his closet. Swensen’s fiancé, Detective Mike Kingston (Cameron Mathison), gets alerted of the potential investigation, but Hannah also pursues her own leads.
She even calls in support from her mother as she tries to put the pieces together about what caused the murder as well as who the victim was.
Watch a clip from “Carrot Cake Murders” below: