Summer Merriweather's career is shaky. She is in England doing research when she learns her mother, Hildy, died unexpectedly of a heart attack. Summer returns to Brigid's Island where she was raised to settle her mother's estate. Something isn't right. Her mother had been healthy-everyone said so. Going through some of her mother's things she finds evidence that her mother had been threatened. Someone wanted her mother's bookshop. Had Hildy been murdered and, if so, why? And, the threats keep coming. Summer and her relatives launch an investigation.
There is a varied cast of characters that includes the police chief who is the father of the man Summer left at the alter years ago and the members of her mother's book club who cook as much as they read. Finding a murder suspect proves difficult as everyone loved Hildy. Even though this is a mystery story it touches on other issues as well. There was a time when Summer couldn't wait to leave Brigid's Island and she had hated her mother's romance themed bookstore. Had she made the right decisions in her life? Being immersed in what was her mother's life brings surprises.
LITTLE BOOKSHOP OF MURDER is a well paced story that is easy to read. It is well written and engrossing. Highly recommended.
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, shuffles off her mortal coil 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."
Clearly, something is rotten on Brigid's Island. What method is behind the madness? Was Hildy murdered? The police insist there's not enough evidence to launch a murder investigation. Instead, Summer and her Aunt Agatha screw their courage to the sticking place and start sleuthing, with the help of Hildy's beloved book club. But there are more suspects on Brigid's Island than are dreamt of in the Bard's darkest philosophizing. And if Summer can't find the villain, the town will be littered with a Shakespearean tragedy's worth of corpses--including her own.
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