The Haunted Bookshop

The bookseller and his wife are thoroughly enjoyable and likable people. It was really fun to read about city life early in the century, when milk wagons and bakery wagons still made deliveries, and apothecaries mixed prescriptions right on the premises instead of counting out pills from a bottle from the pharmaceutical company. This was a very refreshing book.

I thoroughly enjoyed this charming cozy mystery. It called up simpler times and even during the most suspenseful parts, there was the reassuring sense that all would turn out well somehow.

The book is centered in Roger Mifflin's large, cluttered but cozy secondhand bookshop, behind which he lives with his wife. It's part meditation on bibliophilia, and book lovers will likely salivate over the descriptions of Roger's bookstore and his cozy sitting room lined with his most cherished volumes. Roger himself is quite a charming character, if sometimes long-winded on his favorite subject (books, of course).

Onto this cozy canvas of biblio-bliss unfolds a mystery: a volume keeps disappearing and reappearing from Roger's shop, strange noises are heard, and suspicious characters start to turn up. The mystery was suspenseful and enjoyable, but for me, the most charming thing about this novel was its atmosphere.