Murder, Lumber, and Other Means to Civic Improvement: A Cozy Gilded Age Mystery of Love and Murder
Marisa Paxon
I am the narrator of this book. I carried the whole business, the granite library, the fraudulent Shakespeare, the crushed bookseller, the smouldering flirtation, and now, apparently, they expect me to sell it as well. Fine. You may as well have the truth before someone in silk tries to improve it.
Miss Edith Wrenford arrives in booming Muskegon to lend a new public library some English order and is rewarded, almost at once, with a fatal crate of books, erased freight marks, counterfeit display volumes, and a practical American named Amos Norcross who knows perfectly well that wood, paper, and people all lie in different ways. I had barely got her settled among the ledgers before one bookseller was killed, one family’s secrets were packed as decorative literature, and one library opening turned into a public parade of blackmail, stolen papers, suspicious respectability, and murder with very poor manners.
The nuisance, you see, is that Edith cannot let a shelf be lied to, and Norcross cannot let a case history go unread. So I had to drag them through freight yards, false bindings, atlas drawers, family Bible pages, social hypocrisy, and the sort of clue trail that looks obvious only after everyone has finished making it worse. If she fails, she loses her position, her hard-won usefulness, and any hope of keeping the library honest; if he fails, a killer walks off under cover of civic virtue, which America produces in alarming quantities.
This is a clue-rich historical library mystery, with a satisfying logical reveal, non-gory murder, and a closed-door slow-burn romance with an HEA. You are welcome. I did all the lifting.
If you like sharp banter, bookish sleuthing, opposites-attract chemistry, public-library chaos, and a dryly observant heroine discovering that American logistics may be distressingly attractive, this is very much your sort of trouble. And yes, it stands alone perfectly well, because even I am not cruel enough to assign homework before the corpse appears.
So do go on: open the book, meet Edith Wrenford, and let me show you how a town built on lumber, ambition, and respectable lies very nearly shelved the truth.
