The Cracked Spine: 10/21/24

The Cracked Spine by Paige Shelton and Carrington MacDuffie (Narrator) (2016) is the first in the Scottish Bookshop mystery series. Delany Nichols has left the United States to take a job at the Cracked Spine, a used bookshop in Edinburgh. Within her first days there her employer's sister is dead and a first folio is missing.

Delany figures she had best solve both mysteries if she wants to stay in Scotland. Delany, like Josie Way (Witch Way Librarian mystery series by Angela M. Sanders), has the ability to talk to books. For Delany she hears the voices of characters in books she's read and these provide advice and guidance to her. It's something she's been able to do since her early childhood. The stress of the move, the murder, and the stolen folio, though, threaten to end her lifelong gift.

The mystery isn't that hard to solve from the point of view of an outsider who is well rested and not at all jet lagged. For Delany, in a new country with a new accent to wrap her ears around as well as the Scots that peppers the English, it's understandable that she would be slow to piece together the clues. I suspect as she acclimatizes the later mysteries are more complex.

That said, the mystery wraps up in a banger of a climax. While I'm often not a fan of a direct confrontation between amateur sleuth and murderer, this one plays out differently. It also allows for others to redeem themselves and render aid without the scene feeling forced or overly melodramatic.

The second book is Of Books and Bagpipes (2017)

Five stars

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