TITLE:  LOVE AND HOMICIDE

FORMAT: Feature

GENRE: Family Mystery

LOGLINE: A bride-to-be assists her fiancé in discovering who murdered
his mother only to discover the killer may be her own
mother.

COMPS: Valentine’s Day meets Knives Out.

SETTING: Manhattan.

THEME: Children of criminals can have happy lives.

SYNOPSIS: 

Lyla’s thrilled when Sam proposes. But when Sam’s mother dies in a bizarre
car accident, Sam believes it was his father than arranged for her murder. Sam
can’t marry Lyla until he knows the truth. Lyla must deal with Sam’s family’s
unfortunate family dynamics, an SUV that seems to follow her everywhere, and
her own mother’s increasingly strange behavior.

In spite of Lyla’s attempts to deflect her growing suspicions, her relentless
pursuit of each clue leads to the horrifying conclusion that it was her own
mother who was the murderer. After her mother’s arrest, Lyla’s forced to break
up with Sam. There’s no way she can marry him now.

She joins him one last time to apologize to his father for so unfairly accusing
him. She’s shocked to learn that the SUV that’s been following her belongs to
his brother Andy. She confronts Andy and ultimately forces him to reveal that
he had hired her mother to kill his mother because she was going to strip him
and his father of their livelihood.

The realization that there was a criminal in Sam’s family as well as her own is a
game changer for Lyla. No longer the sole-guilty-by-association partner, she
tells him they’re now even. They each had a family member involved in the
murder. Instead of taking on the consequences of the tragedy alone, they could
try to face it together.

Lyla convinces Sam that they deserve a chance at happiness. She proposes.
He accepts. They’ll help each other to recover, move on and forge their own
lives and futures together.