Beach Reads Mystery: Book 2
Publication Date: October 12, 2021
As the holidays approach, bookstore owner Summer Merriwether learns a dark secret in this second volume of Maggie Blackburn’s Beach Reads mystery series.
There’s no place like home for the holidays, even if home is sleepy, beachside Brigid’s Island, NC. During this season for giving, the town wakes up to a welcome throng of shoppers–and Beach Reads is no exception. But bookseller Summer Merriwether’s Christmas cheer turns to cringing fear when she uncovers a deadly secret about her late mother–a secret someone will kill to keep.
When the local library hosts a cozy mystery panel discussion, Summer learns that one of the authors on the panel based her book on an actual murder that shook Brigid’s Island thirty-five years before. Worse, she soon learns that her dearly missed mother, Hildy, took a disturbingly deep interest in the case, going so far as to collect clippings and keep a journal of the dark doings. This doesn’t jibe with Summer’s memories of her usually cheery mother at all.
Tidings get worse when Summer learns of her long-lost biological family’s involvement in the crime…and still worse when the life of the book’s author is threatened. With the help of Hildy’s plucky book club, Summer puts her scholarly smarts to work on protecting the cozy author and solving the decades-old murder.
But this ghost from Christmas past may still be deadly in the present, and if she can’t find the killer, Summer’s future will be brief.
After I finished reading Little Bookshop of Murder, book one in the Beach Reads series by Maggie Blackburn, I was really hoping for a more put-together mystery. The first book suffered from setting up the series by introducing all the characters, and I felt the mystery was just a subplot. But boy, do things change in Once Upon a Seaside Murder.
Summer is still grieving the death of her mother, but she’s settling in Brigid’s Island pretty well. Christmas is approaching, and her bookstore is sponsoring a mystery weekend with a couple of authors coming to town. One of those authors penned a book loosely based on an unsolved murder at Brigid’s Island, and someone is not too happy that it is in the spotlight once again.
Once Upon a Seaside Murder follows Summer as she digs into this unsolved mystery, which involves her newly discovered father’s family.
I wanted more meat in the story, and did I get it. Ms. Blackburn created an unsolved mystery with a lot of twists and turns and then threw in a kidnapping in current day that complicates the mystery. I found the whole mystery pretty compelling and kept turning the pages to see how it all turned out and loved the twist near the end. The cast of characters still are abundant, and a lot of them are rather quirky. But they are a hoot and are a good supporting cast.
Once Upon a Seaside Murder was an improvement on the first book in the series. I found it more fleshed out with a solid mystery and developed characters. I’m looking forward to revisiting Brigid Island and the Beach Reads series.
Maggie Blackburn is the pen name of Mollie Cox Bryan. She writes cozy mysteries with edge. She’s the author of several bestselling mystery series. She’s recently released a novella mystery series: The Victoria Town Mysteries. Her book, “Goodnight Moo,” has been shortlisted for a Fresh Fiction Reader’s Choice Award. Her books have been selected as finalists for an Agatha Award and a Daphne du Maurier Award and as a Top 10 Beach Reads by Woman’s World. She makes her home at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the Shenandoah Valley, Va.
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