A Most Edifying Murder at the Ladies’ Library

A Cozy Regency Mystery of Love and Murder

De: Marisa Paxon

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

I am the narrator of this book, which means I already hauled you through every paragraph of virtue, vice, and shelving, and now they have decided I must sell it as well. Apparently death by furniture is not self explanatory.

Welcome to the Ladies’ Minerva Library, where the hall smells of ink and soap, the rule book is impeccable, and the shelves are full of exactly what everyone swears they are not reading. Eleanor Pryce keeps the catalogues honest, the keys accounted for, and the sermons politely returned, while the Gothic romances travel under cover of moral improvement, as God and Mrs Hargreaves intended.

Then Reverend Swithin arrives in Bath, a celebrated authority on other people’s conduct and the proud author of pamphlets that disapprove of breathing too loudly. He is meant to deliver an edifying address for a virtue loving Society, and instead he ends up very still in the pamphlet room, flattened beneath a fallen bookcase, clutching his own tract like a final insult. The city immediately does what cities do best: invents explanations, assigns blame, and sells the story in a broadside with a woodcut before the body has finished being inconvenient.

Unfortunately for everyone who enjoys an easy narrative, Eleanor does not. She begins counting keys, wedges, cracks in the floor, and the people who knew about them, while the magistrate Mr Challoner turns up to make the paperwork as merciless as the truth. Even more unhelpfully, Henry Blackwood, a handsome publisher with a talent for finding trouble and pretending it is research, decides to linger in the stacks, ask unpleasant questions, and look entirely too at home among the evidence. If Eleanor cannot prove what really happened, she stands to lose her position, the library’s reputation, and the one place in Bath where women can borrow ideas without asking permission first, which is, as you may imagine, the sort of loss that makes enemies very creative.

A corpse, a library full of disapproving pamphlets, and a death that may have been an accident, or may have been someone letting gravity do their work. Try not to look too innocent, it never suits anyone for long.

Perfect for readers who like Regency cozies with sharp banter, bookish sleuthing and clue rich investigations, moral busybodies getting what is coming to them, and a closed door, low heat slow burn romance with an HFN ending, plus non gory peril and a thoroughly satisfying, logical conclusion.

It is a complete, stand alone mystery, you may begin here without fear of missing anything except peace. Go on then, open the first page, and mind the bookcases.