Book review: Death on Demand by Carolyn G. Hart

For Christmas this year, my friend Leslie sent me the first volume of a long-running mystery series.  Ironically, Carolyn G. Hart is from Oklahoma City and came to my high school for some sort of Career Day or Literature Day or something.  I wasn't impressed with her.  My admittedly vague memory is that she came across as arrogant and condescending, based on her great literary achievement as author (at that point) of a couple of airport novels.

So I went into the fourth book I read in 2016, Death on Demand, ready to dislike it.  And there's a lot to dislike.

The protagonist, Annie Laurance, runs a bookstore on a touristy island, which is all but deserted when it's not summer.  Sounds like a recipe for bankruptcy, no?  It gets better.  It's not even a general purpose bookstore; it only sells mysteries.  And Annie is visibly, eye-rollingly annoyed with her best customer who special-orders books "by the carload" through her from the mainland.  Get ready to go out of business when Amazon hits, Annie!

Annie has a sometimes-boyfriend named Max, whom she won't marry because he doesn't hold a steady job.  He's the heir to a fortune, but she disapproves of people who don't work for a living ... or something.  You can tell Max is rich because he has a "cellular phone in his Porsche."  He uses his mother's maiden name because his actual last name is so recognizable that everyone would instantly boggle at him like the Midas he is.  (Hart undoubtedly was thinking of something like Rockefeller, but I amused myself by imagining he's a Trump.)

Which leads us to the next annoying thing about Carolyn G. Hart.  She's a namedropper.  Mystery writers, yes, in discussion of Annie's store, most of whom I've never heard of, but more annoying, brand names.  No one ever just drives a car; they drive a Honda or a Porsche.  No one puts on suntan oil and lies on a towel; they slather on Hawaiian Tropic and spread out a Ralph Lauren towel.  She's an eager little consumer-beaver, but the habit results in the most unintentionally hilarious line in the book, when Annie describes a woman whose mind is like "an IBM PCjr."  What? I thought, It's a plastic brick with less computing power than a flip phone?  I was fairly computer literate for the time in 1988, and I don't recall the IBM PCjr ever being the standard for the top of the line.  Note to authors: "A mind like a steel trap" may be a cliché, but at least it doesn't badly date your manuscript.

The murder at the center of the plot is an overly-complicated Rube Goldberg device that would make Occam's razor weep.  The murderer runs a string from a fuse box in the back room out into the main area of the bookstore, yanks it without anyone noticing to flip all the breakers and put out the lights, throws a single poison-tipped dart in the darkness, using the victim's lit cigarette as a target, opens a baggie containing a nail-polish-remover-soaked cotton ball and removes the clear nail polish from his or her fingertips that prevented any fingerprints from being left on the murder weapon, and throws away the baggie and cotton ball before the lights come back on.

I might mention that the cotton ball in the trash is discovered by the smell of acetone, but did anyone smell the acetone when the baggie was opened and the cotton ball was deployed?  They did not. When the ploy is unraveled, does the police chief insist that everyone's hands be smelled to discover who was just swabbing the stuff all over themselves?  He does not.  Does anyone suggest that the tables, chairs, and coffee pot be dusted for prints to discover who didn't leave any?  They do not.  Is anyone detained or the scene secured for analysis ?  Of course not.  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Naturally, the local police are Boss-Hogg levels of incompetent so Annie and Max have to investigate themselves.  This involves all kinds of late-80s hilarity like racking up long-distance charges on one's Sprint card to research the suspects' backgrounds and having the results FedExed to them overnight.  Ah, halcyon days before the Internet, when information wasn't instant and free.  Another plot point revolves around a roll of film which must be taken to the mainland and developed ASAP.  (Tourist-trap island doesn't have an overpriced One-Hour Photo?  Okaaaay....)

I think the worst offense against reason, however, is a minor aside in one of these expensively-researched backgrounds, which requires one woman to have carried a pregnancy to term without her husband or anyone in her family being aware of it, while another woman's boyfriend believes that she got pregnant and had a baby without him ever noticing.

About halfway through this book, I was vehemently sure that if I managed to finish it, I'd never read anything by Carolyn G. Hart ever again.  By the end, though, I was perversely intrigued.  As a matter of fact, I've already picked up the second book of the series at the used-book store, hoping for more ludicrously-elaborate murders and hilariously-outdated technology.

There is one flaw I cannot forgive in a mystery writer, however, and Hart commits it.  It is inconsistency.  The reader depends on the author to provide reliable evidence; any inconsistencies the reader notices in the story ought to be clues that help unravel the mystery.  However, on page 24, Annie's cat Agatha has green eyes, and on page 183, she has yellow eyes.  In a mystery worth its salt, this ought to be a clue that it's not the same cat; unfortunately, Hart and her editors were just sloppy.