Death Walked In: A Death on Demand Mystery, by Carolyn Hart, starts with an unfortunate phone call and ends with a killer everyone overlooked. How? Easy. They focused in the wrong direction. Add a stubborn, highly incompetent District Attorney to the mix and readers get a page-turning chiller of a mystery.
Annie Darling and her husband, Max, are no strangers to unusual events. While Browards Rock is hardly Charleston, South Carolina, the town separated from the mainland by ferry has plenty of stuff happening that hardly anybody notices. As the owner of a bookstore with one subject -- mysteries -- Annie expects whodunits on a regular basis. In fact, they find her! Couple this with a marriage to a man whose career is problem solving, and the effect is inevitable.
Max usually doesn't turn away an opportunity to help someone. No, he's not a private investigator. The law in South Carolina has strict guidelines for who they issue a license to. He simply advertises in the paper, and the townspeople can read between the lines.
However, this time is different. Max is not far beyond being taken prisoner and nearly killed after a young woman called saying how scared she was. He never knew he was walking into a trap until too late. When Max tells his secretary to blow off a new scared caller, it's a safety precaution. Barb then phones Annie, who goes to the woman's house to see if she can help.
Okay, perhaps Max should have picked up. Be that as it may, the boss needs to have ultimate authority. What he or she says goes. Had Barb understood, the entire mess might have been avoided.
Annie has to watch a woman die while holding her hand. Even though the police clear her involvement, there is still an unsolved case. Gwen Jamison worked as a maid to the Grant family, so there is a starting point. Could one of them have killed her? Of course. The question is who, and just about anyone could have pulled the trigger.
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