Bodies in the Library

Hayley Burke is the new curator of the First Edition Society's library in Bath: a Georgian house full of Golden Age mystery novels she has, awkwardly, never actually read. The job comes with a demanding board, a resident cat, and a writing group of Agatha Christie devotees who have been granted use of the library on Tuesday evenings.

Then one of them is found dead among the shelves, and Hayley's boyfriend's daughter — who was in the building — is the obvious suspect. To keep her post and clear the girl, Hayley has to work out which of the group had a motive, and she has to do it while pretending she knows far more about detective fiction than she does.

Marty Wingate's series opener is a traditional cosy mystery: a closed circle of suspects, an English setting, and an amateur sleuth learning the genre on the job.