Tomes and Tombstones

About this book

The vault used to guard money. Now it guards rare books, and tonight, a body.

Celebrity biographer Everett Crane dies at his own book signing, struck down inside the old bank vault at Paper & Crumb with a bronze owl bookend. The glass case beside him stands open, and Aunt Dot's greatest treasure is gone: Hester Vane's own first edition of A Lantern for Winter, with the author's notes in the margins.

Tess Albright bought the bookshop-bakery from her aunt in March. Twenty-three years as a court reporter left her with one strange gift: she remembers exactly what people said, word for word.

And Aunt Dot said plenty. "You'll leave this town with nothing," she told Everett in front of witnesses, and the bookend is hers.

For seven minutes during the murder, Dot is nowhere, and she won't say where. Now she's charged with homicide, and Tess has put up the whole building as bail.

With the Late Fees Book Club, a tray of cardamom buns from the bakery counter, and Footnote (fifteen pounds of gray tabby, most of it opinion), Tess starts listening. Liars rarely slip on the big things. They slip on the small ones.

A bookshop in an old bank, a cat who steals shiny things, and a clean whodunit solved by the final page. Recipes included.

Pull up a chair at the Late Fees Book Club and start listening.