The Bookshop Detectives: Dead Girl Gone is the first book in a new cosy crime series. Eloise and Garth Sherlock, former UK detectives, retire to New Zealand and open a bookshop, the Sherlock Tomes.
Over the years, the bookshop thrives, with many regular customers and staff who are friends as well as employees.
Then, two potentially stressful challenges arise. The publisher linked to the most successful author in New Zealand requests permission to launch her latest book at the Sherlock Tomes; and a package arrives addressed to FAO PC 60 Sherlock.
Garth is concerned. It’s not because of the book launch or the FAO (for attention of) but because of the PC 60 – the collar number on the uniform Eloise wore when she was a police officer in the UK.
One of the reasons Garth and Eloise left Britain was to be as far away as they could reasonably get from a particularly gruesome murderer Eloise helped to incarcerate. Although given a longish prison sentence, it’s not unknown for a prisoner to escape captivity.
Inside the package is a book and a message: ‘You must investigate the disappearance of Tracy Jervis’.
The book sellers decide to accept both challenges, treating them as adventures. Readers will become fans by the time they turn the final page.
The Bookshop Detectives: Dead Girl Gone is full of gentle humour, pleasant surprises and interesting characters. I’d love to meet them again soon.
Reviewed by Clive Hodges
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Gareth and Louise Ward are the real-life owners of independent bookshop Wardini Books, with stores in Havelock North and Napier, New Zealand.
Louise is known among the staff as Fearless Leader and Gareth as a bit of a dick; he is, however, the author of the Tarquin the Honest and The Rise of the Remarkables book series, as well as being the bestselling and award-winning author of The Traitor and the Thief and The Clockill and the Thief.
Gareth and Louise met at police training college in the UK and are both ex-coppers. Louise has one murder arrest to her name, is an English Literature Graduate and as an ex-teacher inflicted Shakespeare on inner-city twelve-year-olds. She regularly reviews books on RNZ.
Both are obsessed with their rescue dog Stevie, avoid housework and gardening, and live in the cultural centre of the universe that is Hawke’s Bay, Aotearoa New Zealand.
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