The Christie Caper Author:Carolyn G. Hart In honor of the one hundreth anniversary of Agatha Christie's birth, her number one fan, Annie Laurance Darling, owner of the Death on Demand bookstore, is hosting a spectacular Christie convention. It is to be a week-long celebration, complete with treasure hunt, title clues, and Christie trivia. Yet even as the champagne is chilling and the ... more »happy guests are arriving en masse on Broward's Rock Island, Annie can't help but feel a niggling sense of doom. It's not that she doesn't expect some excursions into crime during The Christie Caper. After all, the cutthroat competition of a Christie Treasure Hunt can push even law-abiding souls to dirty tricks and outright cheating. But Annie's worst fears- and her vision of mildly larcenous behavior- pale at the arrival of Neil Bledsoe, the most despised book critic in America. An advocate of hard-boiled detection and gory true crime, Bledsoe can have only one purpose in crashing Annie's ill-fated fete: trouble. Yet who could have foreseen just how much? Before the first Christie title clue is solved, two vicious attempts ate made on Bledsoe's life. And Annie and her unflappable husband, Max, find themselves conducting an investigation with a suspect list a mile long. It seems that almost every author, editor, and agent present has an intensely personal reason for hating the conniving critic. Fleur Calloway, the lovely writer turned recluse, can't even look at the blackguard, while editor Derek Davis, bestselling author Emma Clyde, and even the convention's co-hostess, Lady Gwendolyn Tompkins, England's inimitable reigning Queen of Crime, think murder is much too good for him. Then the real reason for Bledsoe's appearance at the convention emerges: He's penning a scurrilous biography of Agatha Christie designed to smear the memory of the late Grand Dame of Suspense. Amidst a conclave of die-hard fans run amok, Annie finds herself trying to stop a murder in the making... only to find that the first corpse isn't the one she expects- and worse yet, the first corpse won't be the last.« less