A Death on Demand Mysteries Series

In the latest Death on Demand Mystery from the New York Times bestselling author of Don’t Go Home, book seller Annie Darling learns murder and money go hand in hand…

Annie’s friend and fellow shop owner Ves Roundtree is a very wealthy woman. Her rich brother entrusted her with his estate, and upon her death, his fortune is to be divided. Several cash-strapped islanders are in line to collect life-changing inheritances. The problem is, Ves is very much alive.

Ves hosts a dinner for the prospective beneficiaries and feels a chill in the air that has nothing to do with the wintry season. Not long after, she suffers a bad fall that was no accident. Everyone at the table had a motive but not a shred of evidence was left behind. 

When one of the suspects is found floating in the harbor and Ves disappears, Annie and her husband Max spring into action to catch a calculating killer before greed takes another life.

The murder of a Southern literary icon sends Annie Darling’s seaside town spinning in New York Times bestselling author Carolyn Hart’s 25th Death on Demand Mystery…

Bookstore owner Annie Darling is hosting a party to celebrate former Broward’s Rock resident Alex Griffith and his bestselling new novel, Don’t Go Home. But after the local paper announces that Griffith aims to reveal the real-life inspirations behind his characters, perhaps the author should take his own advice. Not everyone in town is ready to give him a glowing review.
 
As Annie attempts damage control, her friend Marian Kenyon gets in a heated argument with Griffith. It’s a fight Annie won’t soon forget—especially after the author turns up dead.
 
Despite an array of suspects to match Griffith’s cast of characters—and a promise to her husband, Max, to steer clear of sleuthing—Annie’s not about to let the police throw the book at her friend when the real killer remains at large…

In this mystery in the New York Times bestselling Death on Demand series, bookstore owner Annie Darling learns just how much she prefers fictional crimes to real ones…

In one tragic week, two acts of violence shake the island community of Broward’s Rock. First, a beloved doctor is found shot dead, seemingly by his own hand. Days later, a local artist is arrested after his wife is found murdered, bludgeoned by her husband’s sculpting mallet.

Convinced her brother did not commit suicide, the doctor’s sister turns to Annie and her husband, Max. She has found a cryptic sketch her brother drew, linking him with the murdered woman. Did someone want them both out of the picture?

Now it’s up to Annie and Max to sort through a rogues’ gallery of suspects to see if someone is trying to frame the artist. But if Annie isn’t careful, she may have her own brush with death…

Bookstore owner Annie Darling has no time to enjoy the summer fun when a missing person case turns deadly in this mystery in the New York Times bestselling Death on Demand series.
 
July is a hectic time for Annie and her husband, Max. Sun and scorching temperatures never fail to bring swarms of tourists to their mystery bookstore, Death on Demand, for the latest beach reads. Not to mention the whole island is buzzing with excitement over the upcoming Broward’s Rock Fourth of July dance.
 
But after Wesley Hurst’s second wife Shell disappears during the fireworks display, Annie and Max take time out of their busy schedule to find the missing woman. Their investigation reveals a twisted tale of blackmail, betrayal, and adultery that takes them from the corridors of the island’s lovely inn to a pier lashed by pelting rain, to a gathering on the terrace of a country club where a trap is set for a calculating killer…

Bookstore owner Annie Darling must solve a murder at the center of a small town scandal in this mystery in the New York Times bestselling Death on Demand series.

Business is slow for Annie Darling’s mystery bookstore, Death on Demand, as winter rolls into Broward’s Rock, South Carolina. To boost her sales, Annie decides to host a book signing for the island’s resident writer. During the signing, Gretchen Burkholt, a fellow volunteer at the local charity shop, Better Tomorrow, leaves Annie multiple voice mails about scandalous news she’s dying to share. So, when the event wraps up, Annie heads over to hear the latest scoop…only to find Gretchen dead on the floor, an ax by her side.

Annie, with the help of her husband, Max, uncovers a mysterious plot involving an overturned kayak, a stolen motorboat, a troubled love affair, and a reckless teenager. Annie will have to keep her eyes peeled and use every trick in the book to track down a cold-blooded killer in the dead of winter…

She came in the rain. Alone. On a bicycle.
Annie and Max Darling are completely unprepared when the arrival of a mysterious young woman shocks their sea island and stirs up more than just gossip.
It turns out that Iris, the beautiful stranger, is a former resident of Broward’s Rock. Her arrival throws the normally happy town into a downward spiral that pits neighbor against neighbor.
Things take a turn for the worse when Annie befriends Iris and invites her to attend the Darlings’ party at the pavilion where Death is the uninvited guest. Suddenly, Max and Annie find themselves in the middle of a fight they don’t understand and at the mercy of an unknown assailant who’s trying to kill them—and all they know is that it is one of their friends.

“The doyenne of American cozies is working at the top of her form.”
–Margaret Maron

The murder of an exotic young woman brings crime too close for comfort
Murder hits close to home for Death on Demand bookstore owner Annie Darling and her beloved husband, Max. While investigating a new case, Max calls Annie to let her know he may be late getting home. He never shows up. Annie knows something dreadful has happened to him.

During the search for Max, his car is found on a remote road–with a murder weapon in the trunk and a beautiful but very dead young woman nearby. The case becomes a media sensation with Max portrayed as an unfaithful husband willing to kill to get rid of a mistress.

As the evidence against Max continues to mount, chief of police Billy Cameron is called off the case. But Billy risks his career to continue the hunt for a silver car briefly seen following Max’s on the night of the murder, and Annie is forced to go undercover in a desperate attempt to clear her husband’s name. Risking her life, she enters the victim’s unfamiliar world in the hopes of understanding how and why Max is involved. With time running out, Annie has one last chance to capture a wily murderer who just may have committed the perfect crime.

When Annie Darling, the popular proprietress of the Death on Demand bookstore, throws a cruise party with guests dressing up as their favorite fictional sleuths, it’s a success—that is until one of the revelers plunges overboard and faux murder turns into real-life death. As the body count begins to rise, Annie begins to suspect foul play. Enlisting the help of her investigator-spouse, Max, best friend and customer Henny Brawley, local bestselling superstar Emma Lloyd and Annie’s mother-in-law, Laurel, Annie searches for answers, convinced that the victims were all connected in some way. But time is running out, since the killer they seek is far more intelligent and efficient than most.

At the Death on Demand Bookstore – “the best mystery bookstore east of Atlanta” – somebody always seems to turn up dead. In Hart’s latest installment, charming owners Annie and Max Darling return to investigate a mysterious death at an art gallery opening on their South Carolina island. When heiress and gallery owner Virginia Neville hosts a bash for an important new collection, she plans to announce her engagement to a much younger man. But then murder crashes the party, and Max is called in to investigate while Annie takes matters into her own hands. Virginia’s family members are not the only suspects – someone close to Annie looks guilty as well. Series devotees will rejoice as Annie and Max’s banter recalls the high jinks of Nick and Nora Charles.

When seasonal mischief turns deadly, bookstore owner Annie Darling and her husband, Max, must again close the book on a killer, in this delightful new whodunit from the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Award–winning author.

Reading about deadly doings remains as popular a pastime as ever for citizens of stormy Broward’s Rock. Now, with spring newly sprung, Annie Darling has conceived of an ingenious promotional scheme: offering a free book to anyone who can solve a series of clues from popular whodunits. Annie and hubby Max pass out their flyers all over town. But an April Fool prankster is distributing a counterfeit flyer–complete with not-so-vague accusations of murder.

Suddenly the Darling name is mud, thanks to the vicious slanders of an unknown counterfeiter. And Annie knows that she herself is going to have to do the bulk of the sleuthing. Then, just as things couldn’t seem to get any worse, they do. In the wink of a bloodshot eye, Annie’s hunt for a malicious trickster has become a desperate search for a killer. Because now more than her reputation is at stake. If she can’t rid her idyllic isle of a secret slayer, the malefactor’s next murderous “joke” may be on her!

Annie Darling’s yuletide preparations have been put on hold because her mother-in-law, Laurel, has taken to chatting up ghosts in the local graveyard. Across Broward’s Rock, onetime movie star Marguerite Dumaney Ladson has called together all of her kin and their exes for a gala celebration. Among the honored guests are Annie’s father and Dr. Emory Swanson. Ladson has fallen for Swanson’s new-age-pseudo-occult gobbledygook. Right after the announcement that she’s leaving her fortune to the charlatan’s Evermore Foundation, there’s a murder. And the finger of suspicion seems to be pointing straight at Annie’s recently arrived deadbeat father. Annie doesn’t believe for a minute he’s guilty. When a second murder occurs, Annie realizes she will need all the help her easy-going P.I. husband, Max, can offer.

One of America’s most beloved mystery writers, Carolyn G. Hart, the Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity Award-winning author, returns to her original mystery
series that features Annie Darling, owner of the Death on Demand Bookstore, and her husband, Max, with Mint Julep Murder.

Normally, Annie Laurence Darling would be eagerly awaiting her trip to Head Island, where this year’s Dixie Book Festival is being held. But this year Annie has agreed to be the author liaison to five authors honored with the much-coveted Dixie Book Festival Medallions, and she fears she is going to have her hands full juggling murderous egos. What Annie doesn’t count on is the untimely death of ambitious Mint Julep Press publisher Kenneth Hazlitt. Hazlitt arrives at the Festival peddling a proposal for Song of the South, a trashy roman  clef that details the indiscretions of some famous Southern authors at a writers’ conference–writers who more than resemble the Dixie Festival Medallion winners. When Hazlitt drops dead after drinking a hit of bourbon from his private stock, the evidence points to Annie–the fatal glass is imprinted with her fingerprints. As more and more evidence points her way, Annie and Max must act fast to catch a wily killer…before the police throw the book at Annie!

Annie Darling, owner of the Death on Demand bookstore, is shocked to hear talk about her husband, Max, and a beautiful blonde. By the time she’s faced down a hostile police chief and bailed Max out of the Chastain, South Carolina, jail, the lady has vanished and Max is the prime suspect in an unspecified crime. The baffling, bloodstained trail leads straight to the doorstep of Tarrant House, home of the venerable Southern family with a violent history dating back to the Revolution—and ghosts of a far more recent vintage.
 
Annie and Max find that the dignified façade of Tarrant House hides a hotbed of deadly passions as the family turns on itself in a mayhem of murderous motives and angry accusations. But in the end Annie must summon all her sleuthing skills to stop a desperate killer who is ready to strike again to keep the secrets that haunt the Tarrants from the light of day. . . .

Praise for Southern Ghost 

“Tantalizing . . . keep[s] the reader guessing all the way.”—The Denver Post

“Pleasing . . . chillingly effective…remarkably satisfying.”—Publishers Weekly

“[Annie and Max] make one of the most attractive pairs of sleuths since Dashiell Hammett’s Nick and Nora Charles.”—Chicago Sun-Times

A group of Christie buffs. . .In honor of Agatha Christie’s one hundredth birthday, mystery bookstore owner Annie Laurance Darling plans a week-long celebration of mystery, treasure hunts, title clues, and Christie trivia. Yet even as the champagne is chilling and the happy guests begin arriving on Broward’s Rock Island, Annie feels a niggling sense of doom. But the last thing she or her guests expect is that the scheduled fun and mayhem will include a real-life murder. The unexpected arrival of Neil Bledsoe, the most despised book critic in America, was sure to raise a few hackles. An advocate of hard-boiled detection and gory true crime, Bledsoe drops a bombshell on the devoted Christie assemblage: He’s penning a scurrilous biography of the grand dame of suspense herself. Before the first title clue is solved, no less than two attempts are made on Bledsoe’s life. Now Annie and her unflappable husband, Max Darling, find themselves trying to stop a murder in the making-only the first corpse isn’t the one they’re expecting. . .and it isn’t the last.

Mystery bookstore owner Annie Laurance didn’t really want to go to her neighbor’s Valentine Day masked ball — particularly not after the voluptuous brunette made a pass at Annie’s husband, Max. So when her dizzy mother-in-law, Laurel, made a surprise visit to Broward’s Rock Island, Annie thought it would be a perfect excuse to skip the party. She should have known better: True to form, Laurel accepted the invitation for all three of them. But the biggest surprise of all came at the party’s end, when Annie found the amorous hostess in the gazebo–murdered.