Friday, December 9, 2022

#FridayReads ~ More Carolyn G. Hart Despite a "Break"



"A group of Christie buffs. . .In honor of Agatha Christie's one hundredth birthday, mystery bookstore owner Annie Laurance Darling plans a week-long celebration of mystery, treasure hunts, title clues, and Christie trivia. Yet even as the champagne is chilling and the happy guests begin arriving on Broward's Rock Island, Annie feels a niggling sense of doom. But the last thing she or her guests expect is that the scheduled fun and mayhem will include a real-life murder. The unexpected arrival of Neil Bledsoe, the most despised book critic in America, was sure to raise a few hackles. An advocate of hard-boiled detection and gory true crime, Bledsoe drops a bombshell on the devoted Christie assemblage: He's penning a scurrilous biography of the grand dame of suspense herself. Before the first title clue is solved, no less than two attempts are made on Bledsoe's life. Now Annie and her unflappable husband, Max Darling, find themselves trying to stop a murder in the making-only the first corpse isn't the one they're expecting. . .and it isn't the last."

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Now, see, I told my ass this: “Don’t you pick up another Death on Demand book and ruin your appetite for them with the fourth book read in a row." My intention was to read within a different series or genre. To get out from underneath Carolyn G. Hart's fantastic cozy series for a hot minute. And, well, knock some of these unread titles off my shelves before this latest package of books arrive tomorrow (YIKES). Yet, the work week was finished. The rain was pouring. The coffee was brewing. Listen, everything in life was in order for some more familiar, cozy mystery reading. Thus, here arrives The Christie Caper by Carolyn G. Hart (Death on Demand #7).

So I'm already fifty pages into the book and loving it. Wholly absorbed in all matters (from personal to mysterious) stacked within this entry. I'm still getting to know the suspicious characters, as Hart does a great job of putting at least five or six of them in a room to see who behaves in whichever way to get readers to "know" them. And the apparent–though not quite yet established as such–victim is particularly spirited and nasty this go’round. But on the other hand, the main protagonist, Annie, remains pleasant and inviting as our central guide to the mystery. The same can be said for the side characters.

Anyway, this book puts an evident and strictly specific emphasis on its references to Agatha Christie and her works. Every other page does some job in ensuring not to lead readers away from that focus and how much these references operate as clues as well. But by book seven, readers will already have established that Agatha Christie is highly revered and favored by Carolyn G. Hart. So it was only a matter of time before she would draw up a mystery and cast centered around an Agatha Christie convention. And the "draw up" is dedicated and fierce in this entry.

I have yet to indulge in much of Christie's work to get Hart's references, but I'm here for Hart all weekend long as is.

Happy #FridayReads

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