March 30, 2015
MWA Grand Master Hart shows no sign of slowing down in her lively 25th Death on Demand mystery set on the South Carolina island of Broward's Rock (after 2014's Death at the Door). Bookstore owner Annie Darling is hosting a party at the Seaside Inn for bestselling author Alex Griffith, who grew up in Broward's Rock and plans to spend the summer there. His new novel, itself titled Don't Go Home, includes characters based on people on the island he knew as a boy. He has boasted that he's now at work on a memoir in which he will be brutally honest about the models for his characters. When Griffith turns up dead in his room at the inn right before the party, Annie's reporter friend, Marian Kenyon, who recently had a fight with the author, becomes a murder suspect, but many others, including Griffith's family members, had motive to silence him. Descriptions of the sultry climate and island life enhance the smart whodunit plot. Agent: Deborah Schneider, Gelfman Schneider Literary Agency.
Starred review from May 15, 2015
After a close call in the prior autumn (Death at the Door, 2014), Annie Darling, proprietor of a mystery bookstore, Death on Demand, on Broward's Rock, an island off the shore of South Carolina, has promised her husband to enjoy crime only from the printed pages. When approached about hosting a signing by Rae Griffith, wife of the best-selling thriller author of Don't Go Home, Annie is delighted by the prospect of a boost to summer sales. Then she reads a note in the Sunday paper that Griffith's book is really a roman a clef, with most of the players still living on Broward's Rock. Annie withdraws her support, fearing that friends and neighbors would be hurt by what Alex Griffith would reveal at the signing. Perhaps Alex should not have returned home at all: Rae and Annie find him dead moments before the signing is to begin. Over the next few days, Annie does try not to meddle, but it's clear her friend Marian Kenyon, the local investigative reporter, is in danger. So she begins to work with Kenyon to ferret out the true killer. Told partially from Kenyon's perspective, this latest will delight fans of the long-running Annie Darling series. An absolute must for cozy fans who enjoy book-centric series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)