Mint Julep Murder
(Libby/OverDrive eAudiobook)

Picture Miss Marple recast as an attractive blond bookstore owner who lives in South Carolina and solves mysteries in her spare time--and you have Annie Laurance Darling, heroine of Hart's latest Agatha Christie^-style mystery. Annie has her hands full serving as tour guide and baby-sitter for five authors at the Dixie Book Festival. Then publisher Kenneth Hazlitt threatens to write an expose that will reveal some very private facts about each of Annie's authors, and suddenly the pleasant festival becomes a hotbed of gossip and intrigue. But real disaster strikes when Hazlitt is poisoned and Annie is accused of killing him. Alternately indignant that anyone would see her as a killer and terrified that she'll take the rap, Annie, like the intrepid Miss Marple, uses her considerable deductive skills, figures out whodunit, and calls the suspects together in the best Christie style to identify the real killer. Hart combines genteel ambience, southern charm, a likable heroine, and some wonderfully nasty characters into a pleasantly entertaining mystery--just right for a warm summer day. --Emily Melton

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 à 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. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

While ensconced on Broward's Rock Island, South Carolina, mystery bookstore owner and amateur sleuth Annie Darling serves as author liaison for the Dixie Book Festival on Hilton Head. Problems arise when a self-serving, small-time publisher promises to write a scandalous roman à clef featuring Annie's five charges‘all quite famous. After the would-be writer dies of poisoning, all evidence points to Annie. When the beautiful, well-married, sexy, and witty Annie begins her quest for the truth, how can she lose? Ebullient tone, fascinating supporting characters, and attention to food and other details recommend this for most collections. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Annie Darling (The Christie Caper, 1991, etc.), owner of the Death on Demand bookstore on Broward's Rock Island, South Carolina, is author liaison for the select group of five writers named Medallion winners at the Dixie Book Festival on neighboring Hilton Head Island. The authors range from Jimmy Jay Crabtree, the worst embodiment of a southern good ol' boy, whose sales are sliding, to bestselling Melissa Sinclair; also included are local writer Emma Clyde; folksy charmer Alan Blacke; and gorgeous redhead Leah Kirby, married to older, adoring Carl. As the Festival gets under way, rumor is rife that Kenneth Hazlitt, Crabtree's publisher and owner of Mint Julep Press, is writing a novel in which the scandalous, well-hidden pasts of all the winners, thinly disguised, will be revealed. Then Hazlitt arrives, ne'er-do-well half-brother Willie in tow, and invites everyone he meets to a cocktail party in his suiteand he's dead of nicotine poison before it's over. Fingerprints in the wrong place make Annie suspect number one, and a second murderof a stranger found shot to death in her cardoesn't help her case with mercifully taciturn Det. Wheeler. There's lots of chatter elsewhere, notably from a trio of local ladies touting their first books to publishers attending the festival while they try to gather info helpful to a beleaguered Annie. They needn't worry. She single-handedly ferrets out the solution at one of those classic gatherings of everyone concerned. Interminable references to whodunits past and present illuminate Hart's encyclopedic knowledge of the genre but do little to light up this talky, tedious exercise.