Book review: Honeymoon with Murder by Carolyn G. Hart

The thirty-fourth book I read in 2016 was the fourth book in the Death on Demand series by Carolyn G. Hart, my semi-nemesis from The Village.  In Honeymoon with Murder, Annie and Max's wedding has come off (thankfully between books so we don't get a blow-by-blow à la Jan Karon, an author for whom I have a much higher tolerance for self-indulgence), but their departure for their honeymoon is postponed when (this time) Annie's friend and employee Ingrid Jones telephones in a panic and then vanishes from the line.  When the pair investigate, they find a dead body on Ingrid's floor and no sign of Ingrid.

Unfortunately, this installment features the return of Brice Posey, who insists that Ingrid is the murderer and a fugitive from justice.  Yeah, it meets my requested criteria of Max and Annie investigating when it's not their neck on the line, but just barely.  Mrs. Brawley, still in her mentally-worrying habit of taking on the personae of different fictional detectives, is left to organize a volunteer search for Ingrid, whom the locals are convinced has been kidnapped, and Laurel Darling teams up with a self-proclaimed psychic to try to solve the crime herself.

Hart gets all activist-y about battered women, insisting that an abused woman with a police witness to her injuries doesn't have a chance of winning in court.  No one even bothers to argue the point (including the police officer); instead, it's Max's money to the rescue once again, providing round-the-clock security for the poor woman whom the system has failed!  The author's constant harping on the theme that rich people are evil oppressors, except for her rich protagonists, is getting old.

The denouement of the mystery revolves around a character with a certain almost-unbelievable talent that was used in the course of the crime, yet which the same character smugly flaunted in public for no real reason.  So the perp is smart enough to plot the crime but dumb enough to demonstrate how it was done to the very people trying to solve it.

Faith asked me why I keep buying these books when they annoy me so much.  I think I'm partly doing so to vindicate my poor opinion of Carolyn G. Hart from more than twenty years ago.