Entitled meddling bookseller [Deadly Editions by Paige Shelton]
It’s a quiet, snowy morning at The Cracked Spine bookshop, when bookseller Delaney Nichols receives a mysterious visitor, a messenger. He presents her with a perplexing note: an invitation to a meeting with eccentric socialite Shelagh O'Conner, who requests Delaney’s participation in an exclusive treasure hunt. Delaney is intrigued, but also cautious: Shelagh, while charming in person, has a reputation for her hijinks as a wealthy young woman in the '70s. She was even once suspected for the murder of a former boyfriend, though ultimately cleared of all charges.
But Delaney is enticed by the grand prize at the end of the treasure hunt: a highly valuable first edition copy of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, by Robert Louis Stevenson. The winner is also to receive the contents of Shelagh's vast library, and all participants will earn a large sum of cash.
The night after the first meeting of the treasure hunters, however, several homes in Edinburgh are robbed in a manner reminiscent of Shelagh's old tricks. And when a man connected to Shelagh is killed, suspicion builds. Except Shelagh herself has disappeared from her home, seemingly kidnapped by the villain.
Terror mounts throughout the city as Delaney attempts to solve the mystery, while trying to evade the killer's clutches. But it’s hard to know who to trust when around every corner, a new monster could be lurking.
The sixth entry in the Scottish Bookshop Mystery series, Paige Shelton's Deadly Editions sees American in Scotland bookseller, Delaney, find herself in the middle of an abduction mystery. This being my first ready of the series, I wasn't familiar with Delaney's character history. What I could surmise however was that she maybe moved to Edinburgh for a job, had a romance with a local, eventually settled down with said local and thus commenced a history of either interfering in or consulting on local police investigations, unsolicited of course. And sure, we all love the story of the civilian, amateur detective solving crimes that stump local investigators. Usually they're unusually smart or skilled, hyperaware of small details, solving mysteries slowly with big aha moments! That wasn't Delaney.
Delaney is the type of woman who says she "doesn't mean to judge" one moment and proceeds to judge the next. She inadvertently or subtly centers everything around herself. She's above things that other women do. Like a lot of savant sleuths, she's lacking self-awareness, lightly critical of herself and hypercritical of others. Or, that is to say, that was my impression of her. The details that miffed me the most was the lack of positioning her added value. Maybe this is because this is my first entry, but for the sixth in a series, even her husband didn't know about her "literary voices?" Delaney was less detective and more haphazardly observant? The idea of random book quotes signaling a vague and obscure clue was unfortunately uncompelling. With respect to this entry in the series, it added nothing.
At large, the story was somewhat incoherent. What were people's motivations? Why did it have to be Shelagh money specifically? Why did we go digging into people's backgrounds and families, prodding them in their grief, researching decades old stories only to have the characters note that we'll never know the whole story? Character motivations and actual key events were not clear as I read. Additionally, the book also read very much like a mix of American stereotypes of Scotland.
The story wasn't my favorite and the protagonist annoyed me, but the read was not hard or long. There was a general mystery to be solved, regardless of how unsatisfying the truth was. So I will be giving Deadly Editions 3 stars. I have not however been enticed enough to read further in the series.
Deadly Editions (ISBN: 9781250203908) was published April 2021.
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