The Bookshop Detectives: Dead Girl Gone, Gareth Ward & Louise Ward

“When we opened Sherlock Tomes people warned us that we’d made a terrible mistake. People warned us that e-readers were taking over. People warned us that we’d never compete with the evil Amazon. The one thing they didn’t warn us about was the murders…”

Introducing...the Bookshop Detectives!

I hear a rumour that the joint authors of this book are also the joint owners of a rather quirky little bookshop in their native New Zealand, so no guesses where the idea for the two main characters of this novel came from. Gareth and Eloise own Sherlock Tomes, a bookshop in Havelock, a small town in New Zealand that has one of those "eccentric English village" "how is anybody still alive here" vibes that lovers of cosy, eccentric, small village style mysteries are going to feel right at home with. As an added bonus these two also own a "petrified pooch", Stevie - petrified as in frightened / not preserved...

Meeting the expectation set by the blurb, this is definitely from the chatty, slightly arch sense of silly fun side of the spectrum, despite the cold case of a missing schoolgirl. Cue the mayhem as they try to organise a celebrity book launch that nobody is supposed to know about, try and keep their shop alive and solvent, all while dealing with a tangled web of crime, drugs and floral decapitations. And shouting where to find books to their loyal and slightly dotty customer base. In fact, the whole thing is on the slightly dotty side. The dialogue is of the chatter style, the characters mostly of the "slightly out of breath" type, and it's all a bit of fun. 

I'm going to take a not too wild stab at the idea that this is going to be an ongoing series. Just the ticket for lovers of this type of humorous, personal, and quite quirky cosy crime fiction.