The Ink & Alibi Bookshop
A Cozy Mystery

About this book:

When rival booksellers Nora Page and Julian Blake inherited their grandparents' merged shops—a cozy crime haven and a haughty literary salon—they declared a cold war over shelf space. She stocks peppermint creams beside the register; he alphabetizes French existentialists by third cousin's maiden name. Their uneasy truce holds until Reginald Vance, a brilliant, twitchy antiquarian, begs for an hour alone with a 1928 ledger in the locked Rare Book Room. Three hours later, they find him dead beneath a cast-iron book press, a neat rectangle sliced from the town's Depression-era records, and Julian's own calling card pinned to the scene with a forged note in his handwriting.

Chief Henderson doesn't buy coincidences, and the evidence is damning: Julian had motive, opportunity, and a spiral staircase connecting the mezzanine to the murder room. Nora knows her infuriating, tweed-wearing partner didn't do it—but proving it means turning their battlefield into a crime scene, deciphering a puzzle Arthur Page hid a century ago, and outrunning a killer who knows the shop's shadows better than they do.

With winter closing in on Blackwood Harbor and the shop's survival hanging by a thread, Nora and Julian must trade barbs for clues, navigate a town where everyone has a story to sell, and decide whether the truth is worth the price of their partnership. *The Ink & Alibi Bookshop* opens a new cozy mystery series where the sleuths argue like an old married couple, the setting smells of old paper and hazelnut coffee, and the deadliest secrets are bound in leather.