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March 21, 2008

The far from cozy Carolyn Hart

I didn’t know about Carolyn Hart’s long-running series of “Death on Demand” mysteries until last year when I was trying to come up with a wide variety of material for a special beach books round-up we ran in the features section of the paper.
My taste leans more toward urban hard-boiled mysteries than what the book trade calls “cozies,” but after reading only a few pages of Hart’s “Dead Days of Summer” I was hooked.
The gore quotient in the novel was low but there was nothing cozy about Hart’s approach to character, setting and, yes, murder. The Oklahoma City-based writer follows in the footsteps of Agatha Christie who knew how to build a great mystery plot around her acute studies of psychology, romance and the relationships in small communities.
Hart’s “Death on Demand” series is set on a seemingly idyllic island off the coast of South Carolina — Broward’s Rock — where the author’s amateur sleuth heroine, Annie Darling, runs the Death on Demand mystery bookstore (“the best mystery book store north of Miami”).
Annie is not a sweet old spinster in the Miss Marple mold, but a vibrant and very smart thirtysomething woman madly in love (and in lust) with her handsome husband, Max, who runs a private investigation service.
In “Dead Days of Summer,” Max was falsely accused of murder and the shadow of that experience hangs over the new book “Death Walked In,” which William Morrow is publishing Tuesday.
The Darlings are in the process of restoring a wonderful old mansion in a rather remote part of Broward’s Rock when they are sucked into a terrible case involving stolen coins and the murder of Gwen Jamison — an African-American woman who worked in the mansion where the theft took place. Although it appears the woman had no direct involvement with the theft, it becomes clear that the coins came into her possession and she hid them somewhere in the Darlings’ partially restored home just before she was killed.
The mystery deepens as it becomes obvious to Annie and Max that someone related to the wealthy owner of the coins, Geoff Grant, stole them and then murdered Gwen. The narrative takes us into the complex relationships in the Grant house where a series of marriages by Geoff has created a tangle of dissolute and very jealous step-brothers and step-sisters.
Hart’s ability to introduce and fully develop such a wide array of characters — male and female, young and old — is quite remarkable. She is more sympathetic to some than she is to others, but manages to empathize with all of them on some level.
The book also shows us how the Darlings have come to have deep reservations about the island police force as a result of Max’s harrowing experience of being railroaded on a murder charge. That experience causes Max to back Gwen’s son Robert when the cops assume the young man with a record of pot smoking and petty crime killed his mother for drug money. Max saw Robert’s face when he first learned of his mother’s death and the investigator has no doubts that the young man is innocent of the crime.
“Death Walked In” makes Broward’s Rock and the widely varied people who live there seem as real as the city block that I live on.
Hart wrote a good piece for The Washington Post last fall in which she gracefully — but forcefully — dealt with the many misconceptions that surround authors who have chosen to work in crime fiction.
She said people who ask her “When will you write a real book?” or “Why do you want to write about murder?” probably haven’t read mysteries.
“Murder is never the point of the mystery,” Hart stressed. “Mysteries are about the messes people make of their lives and how they cope…Every day we see proof that evil can triumph. But there is a world, too, where goodness prevails, where justice is served, where decency is celebrated. I and so many readers find that world in the mystery.”
When I go on vacation this summer, I plan to take a pile of earlier Hart books so that I can completely catch up with the work of this modern master of the mystery. How lucky I am to have 16 unread “Death on Demand” novels yet to be savored.

Posted by Joe on March 21, 2008 6:55 PM

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Posted by: Shirley Frye at November 6, 2008 10:38 PM

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