Book (Not) Bingo #4
The Bookshop Murder by Merryn Allingham
Sussex, 1955: When Flora Steele opens up her bookshop one morning she’s in for the surprise of her life! Because there, amongst her bookcases, is the body of a young man, with a shock of white-blond hair. But who was he? And how did he come to be there?
Determined to save her beloved bookshop’s reputation and solve the baffling mystery, Flora enlists the help of handsome and brooding Jack Carrington: crime writer, recluse and her most reliable customer.
The unlikely duo set about investigating the extraordinary case, following a lead across the sleepy village of Abbeymead to The Priory Hotel. When the hotel’s gardener dies suddenly, and they find out their victim was staying there, Flora’s suspicions are raised.
Are the two deaths connected? Is someone at the hotel responsible - the nervous cook, the money-obsessed receptionist, or the formidable manageress?
As the trail of clues takes Flora and Jack all over the village itbecomes clear there’s more than one person hiding secrets in Abbeymead…
But does Flora have what it takes to uncover the truth - or will her amateur sleuthing put her in harm’s way?
This is the first book in a cozy mystery series set in Sussex, England in the 1950s. At the time, the area - including the tiny (fictional?) village of Abbeymead - was still recovering, both financially and demographically, from the deprivations and losses of two World Wars.
The heroine, Flora Steele, is a young woman who gave up her post-college dreams of world travel to care for her cancer-stricken aunt Violet. Violet had raised Flora after her parents died when she was only six and, after Violet’s passing, Flora inherited the bookshop. As the story opens, Flora is reasonably content and secure in her small village … although she still longs for travel and adventure.
Jack Carrington is a writer and a recluse. Few villagers have ever seen him despite his having rented a house in Abbeymead for several years. However, one day Jack’s regular errand boy is ill, so he visits the bookshop personally to pick up an order of books he needs for research, and he promptly finds a dead body in one of the shop’s secluded nooks.
After a minimal investigation, the authorities declare that the dead man suffered a fatal heart attack … despite his being barely twenty-one years old and having no previous health issues. And despite the fact that he apparently broke into the bookshop during the night for unknown reasons.
When the villagers start to avoid the bookshop, apparently fearing old curses and/or ghosts, Flora decides she needs to investigate the death to save her business. She talks Jack into helping her, figuring that a writer of crime novels will have ideas on how to proceed.
From there, the investigation takes an interesting number of twists and turns, including the death of one suspect, the disappearance of another, and an attack on Jack that could have resulted in his death or a serious injury. There’s some history of the area sprinkled in, along with a few literary references. (Flora owns a bookshop, after all.)
Overall, this is a pretty good book, with a couple of quibbles. The next three paragraphs contain some minor and non-specific spoilers, so proceed with caution.
Quibble One: A substantial clue as to the reason the first dead man broke into the bookshop is dropped fairly early in the story. Since Flora, at least, knows this information, it annoyed me when she kept trying to work out why he was there. She was an intelligent young woman. It should have become obvious to her before it became obvious to me, not long after.
Quibble Two: Admittedly, in the United States, there aren’t huge 15th and 16th century mansions, and I’ve never seen a “priest hole” - which might have been added to the home of a persecuted wealthy Catholic family of that time period in England. However, common sense tells me that such an enclosure, while necessarily small, would have been of little use in protecting Catholic clergy of the era if it didn’t contain enough air to keep the hidden clergyman alive for at least a few hours while the mansion was searched by the authorities.
Why is that a quibble? Well, at the climax of this story, someone is locked in a priest hole … and is so traumatized physically and/or emotionally, that the person is unconscious when rescued and for two full days afterward. Given that the person couldn’t (according to the time frame of the events in the story) have been in the priest hole for more than, maybe, three hours tops, and given also that the priest hole in question was large enough to both stand up and lie prone in, the reaction seems excessive to me. But if anyone is more knowledgeable about priest holes, please feel free to set me straight on this.
Despite the quibbles, and despite the ending of the story feeling a little rushed after the rescue, this book was enjoyable. The mystery was complex enough to hold my interest, and the main characters were well-developed and engaging. I haven’t quite decided whether to buy the next book in the series, but I might. I certainly didn’t dislike this book, and it was a quick, easy read.