Mint Julep Murder
-
- $6.99
Publisher Description
One of America's most beloved mystery writers, Carolyn G. Hart, the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Award-winning author, returns to her original mystery
series that features Annie Darling, owner of the Death on Demand Bookstore, and her husband, Max, with Mint Julep Murder.
Normally, Annie Laurence Darling would be eagerly awaiting her trip to Head Island, where this year's Dixie Book Festival is being held. But this year Annie has agreed to be the author liaison to five authors honored with the much-coveted Dixie Book Festival Medallions, and she fears she is going to have her hands full juggling murderous egos. What Annie doesn't count on is the untimely death of ambitious Mint Julep Press publisher Kenneth Hazlitt. Hazlitt arrives at the Festival peddling a proposal for Song of the South, a trashy roman clef that details the indiscretions of some famous Southern authors at a writers' conference--writers who more than resemble the Dixie Festival Medallion winners. When Hazlitt drops dead after drinking a hit of bourbon from his private stock, the evidence points to Annie--the fatal glass is imprinted with her fingerprints. As more and more evidence points her way, Annie and Max must act fast to catch a wily killer...before the police throw the book at Annie!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this paean to the cozy, Hart sets her lively amateur sleuth, bookstore owner Annie Darling (last seen in Southern Ghost), on a plot in which real mystery writers mix with fictional ones and most of the plentiful potshots are verbal. At the annual Dixie Book Festival, held on Hilton Head island, Annie has agreed to act as liaison for the five authors being presented with festival Medallions. The diverse honorees are a flame-haired author of Civil War novels; a handsome, smug writer of a bestselling male romance; a plump and unassuming woman who pens domestic murder mysteries; the cool author of a popular cozy series; and a loud, heavy-drinking redneck polemicist. Each one has reason to be distressed when the publisher of Mint Julep Press announces his plans to write a roman a clef about Southern writers. When the publisher dies at his own party, after downing some poisoned bourbon, Annie and her charges are all prime suspects. While her husband Max supplements her own reckless sleuthing, Annie must also cope with the determined attempts of her mother-in-law and two writing friends to snag publishers for their efforts. Casting probability to the winds, Hart wraps her light tale in a deliciously inviting setting and offers mystery readers a winsome treat.
