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Sugarplum Dead

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About this listen

 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.©2000 Carolyn G. Hart; (P)2000 Books on Tape, Inc. Mystery Women Sleuths
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I'd never come across this author before (I chose the book because I'd liked the narrator's style in another book). I think this is one case where the written word would have been better. My eye can skim across lists, my ear had to endure them. The book starts (after going through all the blurb usually on the back cover) with descriptions of reactions of several characters who are summoned to a relation for a visit. We don't come across those characters again for a considerable time, by which time I'd forgotten anything about them. When they do reappear it is only for lists of reactions. Marguerite, their host, says or does something and we then have a string of sentences along the lines of 'Terry gazed at his shoes. Donna pursed her lips thoughtfully. Happy looked worried. Wayne.... etc etc. I was ready to scream! Apart from their reactions we learn nothing more about these people until the last quarter of the book.
Add to this lists of authors of other crime novels, which are given every so often on the pretext that heroine owns a bookshop selling mysteries.
The only interesting element was the relationship between the heroine and her new found father and stepsister, but even that petered out.
I'm usually no good at guessing 'who dunnit', but the murderer was been flagged up so far ahead I was sure it was a red herring and was puzzled why it wasn't brought up to be dismissed.

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