Little Bookshop of Murder is the first book in the Beach Reads Mystery series by Maggie Blackburn and is currently scheduled for release on September 8 2020. Summer Merriweather's career as a Shakespeare professor hangs by a bookbinder's thread. Academic life at her Virginia university is a viper's pit, so Summer spends her summer in England, researching a scholarly paper that, with any luck, will finally get her published, impress the Dean, and save her job. But her English idyll ends when her mother, Hildy, dies from an apparent heart attack. Returning to Brigid's Island, NC, for the funeral, Summer is impatient to settle the estate, sell her mom's embarrassingly romance-themed bookstore, Beach Reads, and go home. But as she drops by Beach Reads, Summer finds threatening notes addressed to Hildy: "Sell the bookstore or die."
Little Bookshop of Murder is a mystery that had some really great moments, but also had some aspects that really fell flat for me. I loved that as a cozy mystery there was no attempt to add a romance arch for Summer. I really works in some stories, but not in others, and I do not think it would have added anything here. I thought parts of Summer's character were very realistic- the academic scholar that looks down on popular literature- even though most of the classics were the popular literature of its day. I have run into that attitude from teachers, librarians, and others just as often as those like myself that have the attitude of Hildy that as long as people are reading (and enjoying what they are reading) the particulars are not terribly important. Parts of the mystery were very nicely done, as were a good number of he secondary characters. However, there were moments that missed for me. There were hints about the killer from the very start, enough so that I knew something was up with them though the entire book and I never really swayed from that or was surprised by them. I kept waiting for that bookclub meeting to happen, because it was talked about so much, and for it to be the big reveal. I kept waiting for some big dramatic something, and there was, but by the time it happened I was just waiting to see if the killer ended up dead or if the police would take them in but I was no longer invested. I just wanted to see the wrap up.
Little Bookshop of Murder is a decent mystery, but I was not invested or overly impressed.
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