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Carolyn Hart, where have you been all my life?
Seriously, how is it that I never spotted you on the bookshelves amongst the Sue Graftons and Patricia Cornwells and Sarah Paretskys? Well, I have now rectified that, thank goodness.
Carolyn Hart is a mystery lover's dream come true. Her stories are for anyone who will confess to the guilty pleasure of reading serial mysteries (okay, and even for those of you who won't admit it, but secretly indulge nonetheless). ENGAGED TO DIE is Hart's latest installment --- the fourteenth installment, to be exact --- in the Death on Demand whodunit series featuring Annie and Max Darling, amateur detectives reminiscent of Nick and Nora Charles.
Annie Darling owns a bookstore, but not just any bookstore. She is the proprietor of Death on Demand, a popular venue on the island of Broward's Rock in South Carolina that specializes in selling leather-bound enigmas and paperback puzzlers. If you have ever walked into a real-life mystery bookstore like The Cloak and Dagger in Princeton, NJ, you know the sheer joy of losing yourself in the thievery, murder and mayhem oozing from the pages authored by Dashiell Hammett, Carolyn Keene or Arthur Conan Doyle.
The bookstore setting is ingenious; it affords Hart the opportunity to show off her knowledge of mystery writers, new and old, great and virtually unknown. Conversations in the store between Annie and her customers are peppered with titles and authors, and the reader, if a lover of mysteries, can't help but feel that he or she is part of a special club. Henny Brawley is described as the store's best customer; each of her visits results in the purchase of several books and the exchange of mystery trivia. (Brownie points for anyone who knows the significance of the name "Hepzibah" in the mystery genre.) The bookstore even boasts a cat named Agatha, homage to you-know-who.
The mystery at hand in ENGAGED TO DIE: Jake O'Neill, the young, handsome fiancé of widowed --- and wealthy --- Virginia Neville, has been murdered, his body found face down at the end of an oyster-shell path at an ocean overlook. The suspects are many, including Chloe, the young assistant who works in Annie's store and who had fallen in love with Jake. The Neville family is also not without motive. Upset by their father's bequest, which left virtually everything to Virginia, his nurse-turned-second wife, each of the Neville children could have and might have bashed in Jake's head to keep him from benefiting from the family inheritance.
Max Darling, a lawyer and devoted husband of Annie, is deputized into duty by the acting police chief and begins to investigate the death. Annie decides to launch a search of her own, hoping to exonerate her co-worker. Their seemingly different paths ultimately intersect, as they become unknowing targets of the murderer.
Find Carolyn Hart on the bookshelf. Read ENGAGED TO DIE. Or, better yet, start at the beginning with DEATH ON DEMAND, the first in the series, and work your way up to ENGAGED TO DIE. That's my plan.
--- Reviewed by Roberta O'Hara
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