There is something wonderfully comforting about a village bookshop.
Shelves packed with old favourites. The faint scent of paper and dust. A kettle never far from boiling. Regular customers who claim they have only popped in for a browse and somehow leave with three books tucked under one arm.
Add a picturesque Cotswold village, a recently widowed bookseller looking for a fresh start and a rather inconvenient corpse in the rare-books room, however, and things become considerably less peaceful.
Welcome to The Murder at Bramblewick Bookshop, the first book in The Bramblewick Bookshop Mysteries.
Welcome to Bramblewick
Bramblewick is the sort of English village where everybody knows everybody.
More importantly, everybody knows everybody else's business.
The residents will insist that they never gossip. They merely keep themselves properly informed.
Into this closely knit community comes Clara Bellamy, fifty-eight, recently widowed and determined to begin a new chapter in her life.
Quite literally.
Clara has bought The Crooked Bookmark, Bramblewick's struggling second-hand bookshop. She expects temperamental plumbing, eccentric customers, dusty boxes of forgotten novels and the occasional disagreement over whether a battered old book is genuinely valuable.
What she does not expect is a dead man.
Particularly not one discovered inside the locked rare-books room.
A Dead Historian and a Missing Book
The victim is Edwin Pritchard, chairman of the Bramblewick Historical Society.
Edwin has spent decades studying the village's past and, perhaps more importantly, quietly collecting its secrets.
There are very few families in Bramblewick whose history he does not know.
There are even fewer residents who are entirely pleased about that.
At first, Edwin's death appears to have been an unfortunate accident.
Clara is not convinced.
Something about the bookshop is wrong.
A valuable Victorian book has disappeared.
Someone has rearranged the shelves.
And tucked inside Edwin's pocket is a handwritten message containing six distinctly unsettling words:
“You should have left her buried.”
That rather changes things.
Clara Bellamy Is Not a Detective
At least, that is what Clara keeps telling herself.
She is a bookseller.
A sensible woman.
Someone attempting to rebuild her life, not begin a second career investigating suspicious deaths.
Unfortunately, Clara possesses one extremely inconvenient quality.
She notices things.
The misplaced book.
The hesitation before an answer.
The resident who knows rather more than they ought to know.
The story that changes slightly each time it is told.
Books may occupy most of the shelves in The Crooked Bookmark, but Clara soon discovers that people can be read too.
And Bramblewick contains some exceptionally complicated characters.
Mabel Finch Has Opinions
Clara's investigation would probably be considerably quieter without Mabel Finch.
It might also be considerably less successful.
Sharp-tongued, observant and entirely incapable of leaving well enough alone, Mabel possesses a remarkable ability to acquire information while appearing merely to be having a perfectly innocent conversation.
In a village like Bramblewick, this is practically a professional qualification.
Between Clara's careful observations and Mabel's enthusiastic interference, suspects begin appearing almost as quickly as motives.
The problem is that Edwin Pritchard had spent forty years learning secrets.
Someone appears to have decided that he had learnt one secret too many.
A Mystery Hidden in the Village's Past
At the heart of The Murder at Bramblewick Bookshop lies a mystery stretching far beyond one suspicious death.
The message found in Edwin's pocket points backwards.
Towards an old story.
Towards something buried.
Perhaps literally.
As Clara searches through forgotten books, village records and stories that some residents would very much prefer to remain forgotten, the history of Bramblewick begins to look rather less picturesque.
Old friendships conceal resentments.
Respectable families have secrets.
And events dismissed as ancient village history suddenly begin to matter again.
Because sometimes the past does not stay politely in the past.
Sometimes it walks straight through the door of a second-hand bookshop.
A Cosy Mystery With Books, Tea and Suspicious Villagers
The Murder at Bramblewick Bookshop is written for readers who enjoy traditional British cosy mysteries: intriguing crimes without excessive darkness, eccentric village characters, gentle humour and the pleasure of gradually fitting the clues together.
There are books.
There is tea.
There are secrets.
There are suspects who appear perfectly respectable until someone begins asking inconvenient questions.
And, naturally, there is a village in which absolutely nobody gossips.
They simply happen to know everything.
The Bramblewick Bookshop Mysteries are designed to offer the atmosphere of a classic village whodunnit while introducing an ongoing cast of characters readers can return to from book to book.
At the centre of it all is The Crooked Bookmark, where every shelf contains a story.
Occasionally, one of those stories gets somebody killed.
Meet Your Next Favourite Village Sleuth
Clara Bellamy never intended to become an amateur detective.
She simply wanted a quiet bookshop and a new beginning.
Bramblewick clearly had other ideas.
If you enjoy second-hand bookshops, English villages, hidden histories, suspicious deaths and protagonists who solve mysteries through observation rather than heroics, The Murder at Bramblewick Bookshop may be exactly the book for you.
Put the kettle on.
Find somewhere comfortable.
And step inside The Crooked Bookmark.
Just be slightly careful when entering the rare-books room.
Someone has already had a very bad day in there.
The Murder at Bramblewick Bookshop
Book One of The Bramblewick Bookshop Mysteries
by Robin Wickens
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