Jewel To Play Amateur Sleuth In Hallmark Movie About Homicide And House Flippers

Jewel (folk songstress and reimagined pop star) is no stranger to television—she’s made a variety of appearances on reality shows, talent shows, a CSI episode, and a made-for-TV biopic about Johnny Cash in which she played June Carter. This upcoming project, however, is slated to be her biggest acting role yet. The movie? A Hallmark Channel flick about a house flipper who also moonlights as a DIY homicide detective.

As reported at Spin, Jewel will produce and star in Framed for Murder: A Fixer-Upper Mystery, which is based on the Fixer-Upper Mysteries books by author Kate Carlisle. In the movie, Jewel plays Shannon Hughes, a renovator who specializes in Victorian homes. The character runs into some unexpected mishaps along the way—and we're not just talking about bad weather stripping. According to book blog GottaWriteNetwork, the movie will center around a case in which Hughes suspects foul play in the death of her friend and neighbor. The police claim it was an accident, but Hughes thinks otherwise. In her mission to unveil the truth, she enlists the help of crime reporter Macintyre Sullivan, played by Colin Ferguson, who you may remember for his roles on Eureka and The Vampire Diaries. Also, a $10 million-dollar necklace is discovered at some point. Talk about scintillating.

Interestingly, Carlisle also pens the Bibliophile Mysteries, a series in which a Bay Area bookbinder also runs into murder cases that she takes upon herself to solve. We hate to see what the case load is like for actual homicide detectives in Carlisle’s fictional universe.

One last thing of note: is it any coincidence that Jewel’s track listings also sound like murder mystery titles? There's "Foolish Games," which could have been a potboiler where a private investigator is hired to spy on a cheating pair of lovers, discovering later that one of the paramours has stolen blueprints for a U.S. warhead, and that he’d unwittingly been enlisted by Russia to track him down. Or "Who Will Save Your Soul," in which a homebuyer takes up an old Southern Mansion and finds out that the previous tenants’ long “lost” son had actually been locked in the attic for years. And "You Were Meant For Me," a kind of Mr. Ripley romp in which a woman assumes the identity of her lover’s long deceased wife. As for "Hands," well, where do we even begin!

Framed for Murder, which is expected to spawn a whole franchise of Fixer-Upper Mystery movies, will air on the Hallmark Channel on January 15. Check the Hallmark Channel site for showtimes.