Mint Julep Murder

Normally, Annie Laurance Darling, owner of the Death on Demand bookstore, would be eagerly looking forward to the Dixie Book Festival, where more than seventy Southern authors are to be fabulously showcased. But this year, against her better judgement, Annie has agreed to serve as author liaison to the five authors who will be honored with the much-coveted Dixie Book Festival Medallions. Yet Annie hasn't counted on the likes of publisher Kenneth Hazlitt, who has arrived on Hilton Head Island to peddle a proposal for a daring novel of his own. The steamy tell-all roman a clef supposedly details the indiscretions of some famous Southern authors at a writers' conference. Despite Annie's pleas that he cease coupling his name with those of her authors, Hazlitt plans to push his scurrilous Song of the South at a party thrown by Mint Julep Press. It's an invitation Annie can't refuse, to a bash that promises to be a party to die for. It is. And Hazlitt does, after a hit of bourbon, his private stock, liberally laced with poison. Unfortunately, the fatal glass is plastered with Annie's prints. And as more and more evidence points her way, Annie and husband Max have no choice but to find the missing proposal - and the skeletons in the closets of her prize charges. For it seems the gang of five have motives galore - from adultery and an X-rated past to vengeance, greed, and a brush with "accidental" death - and that any one of them could have written the cold-blooded scenario for Hazlitt's demise.