Little Bookshop of Murder: A Beach Reads Mystery

Summer Merriweather’s ideal life as a Shakespeare professor is steadily falling apart thanks to an incident with her arachnophobia. Running from her problems, she throws herself into researching for a paper by spending a few months in England. Only while she was shutting everything and everyone out, she finds out about her mother’s death. Everyone tells her it was a heart attack, but after she finds a threatening note addressed to her mother, Summer suspects more to the story. Soon, she learns that someone was after her mother’s bookshop Beach Reads and her house. Summer doesn’t know whom to trust so she sets out to investigate her mother’s life and finds shocking surprises that could land her in the crosshairs of a killer.

The story has an emotional core as Summer grieves her loss and she’s thrown into uncovering different aspects of her mother’s life. An eccentricity to the story is derived through the larger-than-life personality of her mother which is vocalized through the various characters and creates a contrast to the more grounded personality of Summer. Though her mother is never met, Maggie Blackburn explores the dynamic of Summer and her mother which puts their relationship at the center of her journey. Little Bookshop of Murder is charismatic and tackles anxiety, guilt, and grieving through a mystery that highlights the relationship between mother and daughter. This is the first book in the >Beach Reads Mystery series.