POMEROY — This Friday and Saturday the River City Players will present a “valentine murder mystery dinner theater to die for” called “Roses are dead, Violet is too.”

Performances and dinner are at 6 p.m., Friday and Saturday at the Riverside Golf Club in Mason, W.Va. Tickets are $25 per person and are on sale at the River City Players Building in Middleport and Dan’s in Pomeroy. Call 992-6759 or www.rcplayers.net for more information.

The production in the first locally written production for the troupe. “Roses are dead, Violet is too” written by Roger, Mary and Darby Gilmore of Meigs County will have its worldwide debut on Friday.

Roger said in the script, he and his family tried to break every convention in theater to make it difficult to figure out the killer. RCP Gary Walker said the play definitely has something for everyone and the fact that it is original material making its debut is exciting to him as well.

The synopsis of the one-act play is that “it’s Valentine’s Day and Hollywood bad girl Violet Wilton could not be feeling worse. When she turns up dead in her own living room during a read-through of her new television series ‘Shirley Holmes, Gum Chewing Gumshoe’ the real character actors come out of the woodwork. And one of them might just be a murderer.”

The Gilmore’s also describe the work as a “hoot of a Hollywood who-done-it, complete with a line-up of unusual suspects.” Characters include an “inept plastic surgeon, the back-talking personal assistant, the dimwitted pool boy, the spaced out psychic, the solicitous screenwriter, the florist and the bombastic British costar.

So, “who done it?” That’s up to the “hard-nosed detective” and the audience to figure out and possibly win a prize.

The audience will also be treated to unique props including the character’s business cards such as Daisy Arcane’s, personal assistant to the stars, that says “when you’re in no condition to handle it yourself.” There will also be tabloids displaying poor Violet Wilton’s fall from grace as a celebrity.

Mary also directs the play with a cast of 11 characters. This is the sixth year that the RCP’s have presented a dinner theater production.