Lost Books and Old Bones
A Scottish Bookshop Mystery
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
Set in Edinburgh, Scotland, Lost Books and Old Bones is a delightful new mystery by Paige Shelton, featuring bookseller and amateur sleuth Delaney Nichols.
Delaney Nichols, originally of Kansas but settling happily into her new life as a bookseller in Edinburgh, works at the Cracked Spine in the heart of town. The shop is a place filled with curiosities and surprises tucked into every shelf, and it’s Delaney’s job to research the rare tomes and obscure artifacts that people come to buy and sell. When her new friends, also students at the medical school, come to the shop to sell a collection of antique medical books, Delaney knows she’s stumbled across a rare and important find indeed. Her boss, Edwin MacAlister, agrees to buy the multivolume set, perhaps even to keep for his own collection.
But not long after the sale, one of Delaney’s new friends is found murdered in the alley behind the Cracked Spine, and she wonders if there is some nefarious connection between the origin of these books and the people whose hands they fell into. Delaney takes it upon herself to help bring the murderer to justice. During her investigation, Delaney she finds some old scalpels in the bookshop’s warehouse—she and discovers that they belonged to a long-dead doctor whose story and ties to the past crimes of Burke and Hare might be connected to the present-day murder. It’s all Delaney can do to race to solve this crime before time runs out and she ends up in a victim on the slab herself.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Deceit and misdirection abound in Shelton's diverting third Scottish Bookshop Mystery (after 2017's Of Books and Bagpipes). Kansan Delaney Nichols is finally feeling at home in Edinburgh, thanks largely to her job at the Cracked Spine, a mysterious bookstore specializing in rare manuscripts and historical objects. Delaney is fascinated when medical student friends tell her of their "wee bit odd" professor who's obsessed with Burke and Hare, 19th-century killers who sold the corpses of their victims to Dr. Robert Knox for dissection in his anatomy classes at Edinburgh University. But when one of the students is found dead in the alley behind the bookstore with a human skull placed next to her body, Delaney vows to discover who did it. Could the murder have to do with artifacts in the bookstore that may have belonged to Dr. Knox? Impulsive Delaney rushes thoughtlessly into danger, and the intricate plot becomes confusing in places. But Shelton's lovely depictions of Edinburgh, its denizens, and its bookshops will enchant lovers of cozies with a Scottish setting.
