An eccentric world of antiquarian booksellers comes alive in this uneven but often delightful mystery.
Charles offers the second installment in a cozy murder mystery series for book lovers, following Murder at the Estate Sale (2020).
The Antiquarian Book Fair in St. Petersburg, Florida, seems like an unlikely setting for foul play, but it provides a rich background for this appealing whodunit. Emma Clarke and Molly O’Donnell are both antiquarian booksellers based in Atlanta, and each year they meet up at the fair to show off, and hopefully sell, their most valuable acquisitions. When fellow bookseller Jasper Ross goes missing, along with several of Emma’s most sellable books, she teams up with Molly to find him. Shockingly, Jasper’s corpse turns up by a local hotel’s dumpster. Emma is horrified by his demise, and also concerned that the valuable books he borrowed may be lost forever. As local police investigate, other booksellers find that their own most valuable items are vanishing, too. When some of the tomes mysteriously reappear, the sellers are aghast that pages with color plates have been “surgically cut out.” Suddenly, the friendly, close-knit world of the fair takes on a sinister aura as Molly and Emma suspect customers and colleagues alike. They scour used-book and print shops looking for missing volumes, excised color plates, and clues regarding Jasper’s death. Along the way, they find allies and informants, including print dealer Stewart, who understands but deplores the illicit trade in stolen color plates. None of the characters in Charles’ novel are explored in great depth, although romantic tension between Molly and Emma builds to a crescendo, and Emma fights off pangs of jealousy when she meets one of Molly’s former loves. The plot is also sometimes slowed by the author’s atmospheric descriptions: “The shop had a lot of floral and herbal prints, maps, and advertisements from early twentieth-century magazines—hair tonics, radios, shoes, remedies: old ads for ‘Brylcreem—a Little Dab’ll Do Ya.’ ” As the plot unfolds, however, readers with interest in the world of booksellers, and the unusual characters who inhabit that world, are likely to be charmed and delighted.
An eccentric world of antiquarian booksellers comes alive in this uneven but often delightful mystery.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 218
Publisher: Black Opal Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best news: The year goes on long enough for the hero to be reinstated. Whew!
Maine game warden Mike Bowditch’s 34th year proves to be his most eventful ever.
It begins when Mike, newly demoted from investigator, sees flames half a mile away and rushes into a burning house, where he’s too late to rescue Jenna Malloy or her husband, gym owner Brian. The only survivor is a baby girl Mike finds in the arms of a neighbor, Karen Kershaw. Waldo County Sheriff’s Deputy Chet Bessel’s reaction to the tragedy tells Mike the deaths won’t be widely mourned. They’re not the only ones that won’t. Soon afterward, the discovery of Axl Deming’s body on the railroad tracks suggests that whoever killed the presumed rapist and murderer of teenager Emily Crockett is bent on vigilante justice. Since the victims are “two of the most hated people in Maine—three if you count Jenna Malloy,” suspects would seem to be everywhere. Mike, repeatedly warned off the case because he’s no longer an investigator, can’t resist focusing on Karen Kershaw, who fled the scene while he was questioning her, and Edward Gudgeon, a scallop diver who frequented the same bar as Axl and his ex-con brother, Shayn. Mike’s on the right track, but his quest will take a twisty route through many more ambushes, confrontations, brushes with fellow law officers who end up suspending him, and threats to his wife, EMT Stacey Stevens, and their newborn son, Charles. Doiron tightens this web with an insistent mastery that will keep most readers from noticing just how far-reaching it is until they’ve gained the end and can take some deep, cleansing breaths.
The best news: The year goes on long enough for the hero to be reinstated. Whew!Pub Date: June 30, 2026
ISBN: 9781250864451
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2026
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
