Lost Books and Old Bones

Paige Shelton's Lost Books and Old Bones is a delightful new mystery featuring bookseller and amateur sleuth Delaney Nichols, set in Edinburgh, Scotland.

*INCLUDING A BONUS STORY, A CHRISTMAS TARTAN, FOR THE FIRST TIME IN PRINT!*

Welcome back to Cracked Spine bookstore, where a collection of antique texts may hold the key to solving a present-day murder.

Delaney Nichols, originally of Kansas, is settling happily into her new life buying and selling rare books in Edinburgh, Scotland. When her new friends, who are students at a nearby medical school, come to the shop to sell a collection of antique medical books, Delaney’s sixth sense tells her that the multivolume work is of great value. But once Delaney finalizes the transaction, things take a dramatic turn. . .

One of the medical students has turned up dead in the alley behind the Cracked Spine. Is there a sinister connection between the origin of these books and the people whose hands they fell into? Delaney seems to have her answer when, lo and behold, she finds some old scalpels in the bookshop’s warehouse—and discovers that they belonged to a long-dead doctor with ties to past crimes. But how can one American-born bookseller take it upon herself to solve this historic case? With the killer still on the loose, Delaney has only so much time left to find out. . .

“[For] readers who appreciate bookseller sleuths such as Marianne Macdonald’s Dido Hoare or Joan Hess’s Claire Malloy…The feisty Delaney is an appealing protagonist and the secondary characters are charming as well.”—Library Journal

“A complicated mystery with plenty of historically-based characters and whose ending provides more than one kind of surprise.”—Kirkus Reviews