Book review: Design for Murder by Carolyn G. Hart

As promised, the twenty-seventh book I read in 2016 was the second book in Carolyn G. Hart's Death on Demand series, Design for Murder.  Annie and her apparently ludicrously-profitable specialty bookstore are called upon by the cast of "Dallas" to run a Murder-Mystery Week for a Tour of Homes in a nearby town on the mainland.

All right, it's not actually the cast of "Dallas," but it's definitely the kind of stereotypical Southern community that go around stabbing each other in the back, sleeping with each other's spouses, and throwing drinks in each other's faces.  Fittingly, the murder mystery is an adaptation of "Who Shot J.R.?" in which everyone who knows the victim has a motive to want her dead.

So who does the provincial Southern police chief suspect?  Why, Annie Laurance, of course!  I hope Hart eventually finds a motive for Annie and Max to get involved in these investigations that's not clearing their own names; every police chief everywhere being a fat, corrupt, xenophobic Boss Hogg is already getting ridiculous after two outings.

Now that Annie is no longer coming up with reasons not to be involved with Max, she is less annoying, but Hart's contrivances still grate.  She clearly missed her calling as a writer for an interior design magazine, as she has never met a room she doesn't describe in fawning detail.  (Cream and rose must have been hot colors in 1987.)  When Annie finally gets to one of the Homes to be Toured, we get three paragraphs of English Sheraton cabinets, Meissen and Sevres china, French Empire card tables, and Chippendale mirrors before anyone gets any dialogue out.

More annoying is Hart's "I am eccentric, you are weird, he is crazy" attitude toward her characters. Early on, we see Max turning down a job he considers beneath him: digging up dirt on a property owner to blackmail him to sell his land to a developer at a bargain-basement price.  "Why don't you go after your money the old-fashioned way, Jenkins?"  he sneers.  "Why don't you earn it?"  Which, frankly, is rich, coming from a heir to a fortune who can't be bothered to take the South Carolina bar exam because it's just too much work.  But Max, Hart assures us, is a Good Rich Person, as opposed to everyone else on the island, who are Bad Rich People, though what evidence she has for that other than his inclination to spend his money at a whim on Annie rather than on some form of employment is never made clear.  And Annie herself falsifies the entries to her Murder Mystery game so that someone she knows can lay claim to part of the prize, an act that we're apparently supposed to think is kind rather than fraudulent.