Jessica travels to Nashville Tennessee for a concert featuring her friend Patti Sue. While there, however, matters become as angsty as a country song. Patti Sue confesses that her husband seems suicidally depressed, and shortly thereafter, he and she end up the victims of a dose of strychnine.
This episode includes examples of the following tropes:
- Always Murder: Double subverted. Initially, the police think Bobby Diamond was murdered. Then, after being caught trying to disconnect Patti Sue's life support, Alice confesses that she hid a suicide note in an attempt to frame her stepmother. However, Jessica later figures out that it really was murder.
- Chekhov's Gun: Alice mentions a letter her father sent Patti Sue, which she thinks was about how depressed he's been lately. It turns out it contained the motive for the poisoning.
- Chekhov's Gunman: Bobby Diamond has a liaison with a young woman who hopes to soften him up enough that he'll accept her real boyfriend's work. He planned to leave his wife for her, and his wife killed him in revenge.
- Early Personality Signs: Jessica apparently liked reading Nancy Drew novels as a girl; Patti Sue recalls an incident in which she pulled another girl's braid for hiding one she'd nearly finished.
- Framing the Guilty Party: Alice found her father dead after leaving the party, complete with a suicide note. Furious at the thought of her stepmother Patti Sue inheriting everything, she hid the note and poisoned Patti Sue, hoping to make it look like she attempted suicide out of guilt. However, Patti Sue actually did kill her father.
- I'll Kill You!: A songwriter confronts Bobby, wanting back the song rights that Bobby acquired when he took over the studio that previously held them. When he says there's nothing he can do, the man threatens to kill him if he doesn't return the rights pronto. Naturally, he didn't actually murder him.
- Motive Misidentification: Jessica initially thinks the killer took the tape Bobby was recording because it contained incriminating evidence. In fact, the killer wasn't there when he died and took the tape because she didn't want the sounds of Bobby dying from strychnine to be his last recording.
- Wicked Stepmother: Patti Sue is Alice's stepmother, and neither seems to like the other much. However, before the events of the episode, it restrained itself more to typical family drama.
- Woman Scorned: The motive for the murder. The "suicide note" was actually page 2 of a letter Bobby had written to Patti Sue, telling her he'd found someone else. She was so infuriated at his discarding her after all these years that she poisoned his nightly bourbon with strychnine and set it up to look like suicide.
