Description
A bookshop. A ledger. A man who wasn't who the catalogue said he was.
Bridie Quell spent twenty years correcting other people's sentences. Then her aunt Vesta died and left her Marrow & Vine, a second-hand bookshop on the square of an English village she had never heard of. With it came thirty-one years of the shop's buying ledgers, in whose margins Vesta wrote down exactly what she thought of everyone who came through the door.
Bridie has read every line. For stock, she says. Including the one about herself: Quell, B. -- Oxford. Corrects other people's letters for a living. Won't want a shop. V.
Vesta was wrong about that.
Among the stock are fourteen books Vesta bought in March 1995 and never sold. Bridie has put them into the village auction, and in the catalogue, in her own hand, she expanded her aunt's entry -- Hearne, A. -- to the only Hearne she knew: From the library of Ambrose Hearne, 1995.
On the night of the auction preview, a dealer who signed in as Ambrose Hearne is found dead on the stockroom floor beneath the gallery, the shop's ladder across his back. The inspector says he fell. The pathologist says he was on the floor before the ladder came down. The village has already decided who did it -- the dealer from out of town who has been telling the pub, loudly, where he was that night -- and does not care to be asked again. Bridie, who believes only what is written down, is not so sure.
She does not go to doors. She reads paper. Callum, her seventeen-year-old Saturday boy, walks the village, reports back, and tells her when she is guessing ('That's not evidence. That's a mood.'). Dawn, who runs the till and has no time for books, keeps the shop open and Bridie fed. And Bridie sits under her aunt's lamp with the fire officer's book, a builder's written statement, thirty-one ledgers and a pencil, and crosses names off one at a time.
Seven names. Six of them went out of her door without anyone seeing them go. One of them may never have left.
And in the 1995 ledger, beside those fourteen books, her aunt has inked over the seller's name so heavily that it came through the other side of the page.
The Wrong Ambrose Hearne is the first Marrow & Vine Mystery: fair play, a very English village, a warm and dry sense of humour, a detective sergeant who never writes anything down, a dead woman who wrote down what she thought of everybody and was not always right, and a cat that is not the shop's. Everything Bridie has, you have. You may get there before she does. She would rather you didn't.
For readers of Anthea Fraser and Verity Bright.
A bookshop. A ledger. A man who wasn't who the catalogue said he was.
Bridie Quell spent twenty years correcting other people's sentences. Then her aunt Vesta died and left her Marrow & Vine, a second-hand bookshop on the square of an English village she had never heard of. With it came thirty-one years of the shop's buying ledgers, in whose margins Vesta wrote down exactly what she thought of everyone who came through the door.
Bridie has read every line. For stock, she says. Including the one about herself: Quell, B. -- Oxford. Corrects other people's letters for a living. Won't want a shop. V.
Vesta was wrong about that.
Among the stock are fourteen books Vesta bought in March 1995 and never sold. Bridie has put them into the village auction, and in the catalogue, in her own hand, she expanded her aunt's entry -- Hearne, A. -- to the only Hearne she knew: From the library of Ambrose Hearne, 1995.
On the night of the auction preview, a dealer who signed in as Ambrose Hearne is found dead on the stockroom floor beneath the gallery, the shop's ladder across his back. The inspector says he fell. The pathologist says he was on the floor before the ladder came down. The village has already decided who did it -- the dealer from out of town who has been telling the pub, loudly, where he was that night -- and does not care to be asked again. Bridie, who believes only what is written down, is not so sure.
She does not go to doors. She reads paper. Callum, her seventeen-year-old Saturday boy, walks the village, reports back, and tells her when she is guessing ('That's not evidence. That's a mood.'). Dawn, who runs the till and has no time for books, keeps the shop open and Bridie fed. And Bridie sits under her aunt's lamp with the fire officer's book, a builder's written statement, thirty-one ledgers and a pencil, and crosses names off one at a time.
Seven names. Six of them went out of her door without anyone seeing them go. One of them may never have left.
And in the 1995 ledger, beside those fourteen books, her aunt has inked over the seller's name so heavily that it came through the other side of the page.
The Wrong Ambrose Hearne is the first Marrow & Vine Mystery: fair play, a very English village, a warm and dry sense of humour, a detective sergeant who never writes anything down, a dead woman who wrote down what she thought of everybody and was not always right, and a cat that is not the shop's. Everything Bridie has, you have. You may get there before she does. She would rather you didn't.
For readers of Anthea Fraser and Verity Bright.