The Bookshop Murder (A Flora Steele Mystery # 1)
by Merryn Allingham
A Kindle book in the "cosy crime" genre that I downloaded for free back in 2023.
The story is set in Sussex in 1955, in a village called Abbeymead. Flora Steele owns a small bookshop (All's Well), inherited from an aunt. She also offers a delivery service - as in delivering books herself to some of her customers, using her bike.
One day, Flora gets a nasty surprise: The body of a young man is found in her shop. At first it seems he just died of a heart attack; but a mystifying factor is that he wasn't suffering from any disease to explain that. Rumours start going round in the village, and Flora starts losing customers as a consequence.
Flora decides to look for explanations herself, and takes help from a customer, Jack Carrington, who is also crime writer himself. He is somewhat of a recluse, but in their joint efforts to look into this mystery, they become friends.
When another death occurs in the village, they start looking for connections, and find some possible clues to suggest motives involving village history and legends, and an old estate nowadays known as the Priory Hotel.
One advantage (for the author) of setting a mystery in the 1950s is that you then can make use of certain kinds of evidence that would not fit at all in a story set in the 21st century. There's a kind of classic Agatha Christie atmosphere to it all.
I found myself getting more easily caught up in this book than I expected. I might try another one in the series some time (it seems there are 11 so far). And she has also written other books. You can find the author's webpage here.
I still have lots of other unread books on my Kindle, though...
I read this last November/December and liked it well enough, too. Nobody commented on my review, so maybe it never showed up on people's blog reading lists:
ReplyDeletehttps://librarianwithsecrets.blogspot.com/2024/12/read-in-2024-28-bookshop-murder.html
PS: Like you, I quite liked the 1950s setting and what it meant for mystery solving. Also, people do not head out in their own cars all the time - they walk, cycle, or take a bus, which made a nice change.
DeleteMeike, I went back and read your review now. I might have read it before, but I'm not sure. I sometimes read blogs on Feedly on my tablet, and forget to go back again later to comment... It seems our impressions of this book were rather similar.
ReplyDeleteI also like books set in the 50's its familiar to me, well most years are familiar to me at my age.. this one sounds like I might like it
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