Prologue to Murder

The second Beyond the Page Bookstore Mystery finds Addie Greyborne settling into life at her bookshop in Greyborne Harbor until the local paper's gossip columnist takes an interest in her.

When the librarian June Winslow fails to come home from a book club meeting and is later found at the bottom of a steep flight of stairs, the column turns insinuation into an accusation, and Addie is left with both a busybody and a body. The thread that matters runs through a book June published on the town's pirate legends, and through the buried history the town would rather not revisit.

Lauren Elliott keeps the series' bookish cozy register: a small seaside town, a heroine who reads a case the way she reads provenance, and a mystery solved without gore.