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.