Yankee Doodle Dead (Death on Demand Mysteries, No. 10)

Unless you find the idea of a woman who runs a mystery book store as an amateur crime solver just too cute for comfort, you'll have some fun with Carolyn G. Hart's latest cozy yarn about Annie and Max Darling, the Nick and Nora Charles of the South Carolina island resort town called Broward's Rock. Annie, of course, still keeps her Death on Demand book shop, matching wits with customers about unlikely murder methods from classic mysteries while serving them iced café lattes to ward off the summer heat. Max, the most underemployed private detective of recent memory (he doesn't seem to have had a paying client since 1995), is still as charming and sexy (to Annie, that is) as ever--although his annoying mother, Laurel, has become positively dangerous. But Laurel is only one of a veritable Orient Express-load of possible suspects when an obnoxious ex-military man is shot to death at the Broward's Rock Fourth of July Festival. The racist, sexist, antigay Bud Hatch could have been killed by any of his several enemies. It's up to Annie and Max to clear Laurel and various other friends of suspicion, and Hart certainly knows how to keep a familiar story from becoming too obvious. Other Death on Demand tales in paperback: The Christie Caper, Deadly Valentine, Death on Demand, Design for Murder, Honeymoon With Murder, A Little Class on Murder, Mint Julep Murder, Something Wicked, Southern Ghost. --Dick Adler