Do you want to read more of my cozy?

Here is my entry in Sari's Blogfest: the first five hundred words of a cozy mystery called WHO KILLED TOM JONES?--a WIP at 31,500 words to date.

My question to blogfesters is simple--do you want to read more? If not, why not?

Chapter One

What would it take to make Ellie Tetzel swoon? A white puffy shirt and pair of bell bottoms? A swath of dark chest hair, a puffy shirt, and pair of bell bottoms? Or would she have to see the total effect—a crown of curly hair, a swath of chest hair, the ruffled shirt, the platform shoes, and the swinging pelvis wrapped in a pair of tight bell bottoms—before she felt fashionably faint?

Ellie asked herself these questions as she drove to the fairgrounds hosting the first Tom Jones Festival ever in Grippey, Pennsylvania, and the first she’d ever attended. Maybe the only such festival in the entire world. She didn’t know the answers to her questions, but she had a two-hour reprieve from the rest home granted by The Big Boss himself to find out.

 “Daily or weekly pass,” asked the large sunburnt woman seated at the entrance gate, wearing a sleeveless dress and a straw sombrero. Patches of skin on beefy arms glowed from too much sun. The tender skin under her eyes blazoned red. The last time Ellie saw skin that red and scaly, she had been watching  “Lizard Week” on Animal Planet.

Ellie expected townsfolk to turn up looking like freshly steamed lobsters at this event. After a long, cold spring, summer finally burst out in Grippey over the weekend. The first few days it actually feels summery, Grippeyans typically spend every possible hour outdoors—admiring their roses, riding their Harleys, tubing down “the Gripp,” as locals called it—just plain overdoing their exposure to the sun’s ultraviolet rays.

“How many contestants?” Ellie asked. In the universe of uniquely gifted men, were there enough really good Tom Jones impersonators to make a weekly pass worth the investment?

“Twenty on the dot,” the attendant said, wincing on dot as if plagued by a sharp pain between her shoulder blades. Peeling sunburn, likely.

“Are they any good?”

“Are they any good?” the gate attendant mimicked. “Would I be selling these here tickets if they weren't?”

 “Weekly then,” Ellie replied, digging out her wallet, forking over thirty bucks—half a day’s pay. She had missed the first day of the festival, working second shift at the rest home. But what’s thirty hard-earned dollars compared to the chance to see Tom Jones? Not Tom Jones exactly, but darn good facsimiles, nearly two dozen of them.

Earlier in the day, she watched YouTube videos on her desktop computer during her lunch hour, with Mrs. Peachey, a Hand Rest Home resident, studying the video clips over her shoulder. Precious little difference between the best impersonators and the real McCoy, at least via YouTube transmission qualities.

“What a man!” Mrs. Peachey said, glued to the monitor. “They don’t make ’em like that anymore.”

(end of segment)