Proof of Murder is the fourth book in the Beyond the Page Bookstore Mysteries, featuring bookstore owner Addie Greyborne. A haunted mansion, a stolen edition of Sherlock Holmes and a locked-room murder mystery – this is the perfect cozy mystery set up!
Title: Proof of Murder
Author: Lauren Elliott
Series: Beyond the Page Bookstore Mystery #4
First Published: April 28, 2020
Publisher: Kensington Books
Categories: Mystery
Acquired: from the publisher via NetGalley
*** Thank you to the publisher, Kensington Books, for providing me with an advanced e-copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review. ***
The seaside New England town of Greyborne Harbor is home to many grand estates. Now one of those mansions is holding an estate sale, and bookshop owner Addie Greyborne checks it out, hoping to find some rare editions to sell. Addie volunteers to assist overwhelmed insurance appraiser Charlotte McAdams with the inventory, and gets more than she bargained for. Things get interesting when Addie finds an 1887 magazine containing Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, which she estimates to be worth over $150,000.
Later, Addie discovers Charlotte dead in the mansion’s library, the door bolted from the inside, and the priceless edition missing. It’s a locked-room mystery!
A great locked-room mystery
I love a good mystery involving a locked room! You know there can only be so many ways that the mystery can be resolved so it’s always interesting to see how an author puts their own twist on it. And with it being a large, old mansion (complete with its own ghost story) you know this one will have some secret hiding places too. The mystery is well done and, while I had no sympathy for the victim (she wasn’t very pleasant), there was enough to keep me very interested in finding out whodunnit.
This mystery had just the right number of suspects. What does that mean? Well, some mysteries have a motive for everyone in town, while others zero in on one suspect right away. This one has a few suspicious characters, not too many to overwhelm but not too few to make it easy to figure out who the killer is. I had fun guessing throughout most of the book.
Addie’s knowledge, experience and connections makes her a natural amateur sleuth and I can easily believe that she’d be able to solve a real mystery. She’s currently one of my favourite cozy mystery sleuths – she’s smart, capable, independent, but still flawed enough to make her relatable. Addie is one of the main reasons that I keep coming back to this series – between her and the good solid mystery, this series has been able to hold my interest.
A confusing time jump and a resolved love triangle
One of the things that I didn’t like was the time-jump between Book 3 and 4 in the series. When I first started reading Proof of Murder, I was so confused because the characters kept referring to events that I didn’t remember reading about. This happened enough that I had to pull out the previous book and read the ending again to make sure I hadn’t missed something. I hadn’t. Plus, the events that happened “off the pages, between books” were HUGE events. They get explained a bit better later on in the book (much later) but I didn’t enjoy being so confused for so long at the beginning.
I enjoy most of the characters in this series, but the addition of two new characters in this book will make things interesting in the next instalment – especially since I didn’t care for either of them.
Also (again, no spoilers) I feel like the “new romance” that is introduced is rushed and seems like it would be a huge conflict of interest, but it’s fiction, so it’s ok, I guess? *shrug*
The love triangle between Addie, Simon and Marc does get resolved so moving forward things should be much smoother sailing. I definitely think she made the right choice. There were a few “conversations” that happened near the end that made me SO MAD. I wanted to punch the guy (no spoilers). And I’m so happy that Addie reacted the same way I would have. If she had acted different I would have been very disappointed in her. But she didn’t. She stays true to her character and reacted exactly how I would have expected her to and I love that.
But honestly, aside from the time jump and some annoying characters, the good FAR outweighs the bad. Addie is still one of my favourite amateur sleuths and I’m looking forward to the next book in the Beyond the Page Bookstore Mystery series.
Read Proof of Murder for yourself
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Well, that’s another book for my #AtoZCozy2020 Reading Challenge!
I’m very happy to add Lauren Elliott as the letter “E” to my year-long alphabet challenge – still more than half the alphabet to go – eep! I’ve been trying to discover new authors during this challenge but it’s always nice to have favourites to read as well and I couldn’t resist since there was a new book in one of my favourite cozy mystery series.
If you’d like to learn more about the challenge, have some suggestions or want to join in, check out my blog post about it here.
