This is the sixth book in our A to Z Mystery Tour through a local library, and was pulled from the third shelf of the second bay in the Mystery section. I will be choosing one book (hopefully the first book) from a mystery series on each shelf , in alphabetical order by author, and reviewing it here. I have added the series title list for each book to the website under Series in Order in the menu; you can also view the entire series by clicking on the series name below.
Lucy Arlington* 2012 – A Novel Idea Mysteries #1
Lila gets the boot after twenty years as a reporter; as luck would have it (a lot of luck), her hometown of Dunstan, North Carolina, has a literary agency, and that agency has an opening for an intern. Lila is hired on the spot.
All of this happens in the first ten pages of Buried in a Book. Luckily that pace slows down – but the murder of what appears to be a homeless man pops up pretty quickly, and right on the sofa in A Novel Idea literary agency’s reception area!
This is the first mystery that I’ve read with an eye toward actually figuring out who the killer was; I caught little comments that I considered clues, made note of whose whereabouts were unknown at the time of the murders (yep – at least one more murder happens), and made an educated guess based on the evidence I found.
I was right – and I was right about the killer’s accomplice too; but I’m not considering that a deficit in the novel; I only got one killer right, and I worked this book like a jigsaw puzzle to see the whole picture.
Drawbacks: the main character repeatedly wished she could just rest her head on the broad shoulder of her love interest, so that he could make it all better and solve her problems for her. That’s such an outdated sentiment, even for a 2012 novel. I also couldn’t get past the unlikely setting of a fairly large literary agency handling bestselling authors operating outside of New York City, in a small town in North Carolina. The story was an easy read though, and there were some entertaining characters, including Lila’s psychic mother Althea.
*Lucy Arlington is the pen name created for this series; this and the following two installments were co-written by Ellery Adams and Sylvia May, and succeeding titles are authored by Susan Furlong, who is also writing as Lucy Arlington.