April Fool Dead, by Carolyn G. Hart

Thursday, November 18, 2004

April Fool Dead, by Carolyn G. Hart, is a South Carolina mystery based in the Death on Demand bookstore featuring Annie and her husband Max Darling.

In April Fool Dead, by Carolyn G. Hart, Annie Laurence Darling, who runs Death on Demand, a mystery bookstore on a South Carolina Island known as Broward's Rock, creates fliers for a contest for mystery fans to publicize an April Fool's Day signing event. Someone else makes a convincing spoof of Annie's fliers with a series of clues based on Broward's Rock's hit and run, adultery, and other scandals of recent years. The fake contest prize is hefty and tempers are short with everyone blaming Annie until she manages to convince them that she did not write the fliers or dig up all the local dirt. Who created the fake fliers was only the first mystery of April Fool Dead. Who killed the prim and proper local high school teacher who may or may not have been responsible for the fliers comes next, followed quickly by the mystery of the terrified senior and her murder.

Annie, her guest mystery best-selling writer Emma, and the police each try to stroke their egos by solving the mysteries first. Meanwhile, Annie's flakey mother-in-law is incommunicado while out dousing and intimates that she may have witnessed a murder. A retired police chief Frank Saulter is fearful of a paroled murderer, although when the time comes for the two to confront each other, Frank neatly shoots his would-be assailant's gun from his hand.

Both Annie and Emma use their mystery reading skills to deduce clues. Annie and her husband Max hatch a plot that would be called entrapment by the police. It succeeds in flushing out into the waiting arms of the police the faculty member guilty of at least one murder.

In the end, normalcy is restored. Annie and Emma's book signing event is the biggest in local history. The prize that Annie had promised with no way of delivering is neatly revoked. But we still don't know for sure if the high school teacher was responsible for the fake fliers which had featured so prominently at the start of the book. Other weaknesses of April Fool Dead are the conventional improper relationship between faculty member and student and the uninspired perfection of Annie's husband. Even the emblematic cat of the cozy is used more to depict Annie's own eating habits than as a character in its own right, and details about the charming bookstore are pitifully few. Carolyn G. Hart has written better, more engaging mysteries, but for mystery puzzle fans and those who enjoy the stories about Broward's Rock, April Fool Dead is worth reading.

Thursday, November 18, 2004