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    Book Club
    Book Club
    Book Club
    Ebook39 pages25 minutes

    Book Club

    By Loren D. Estleman

    3.5/5

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    About this ebook

    When a bibliophile is murdered, it takes a bookseller to solve the crime.
    Good Advice, New Mexico, is a sunny town with a gloomy bookshop. The store’s eerie corridors are the province of Avery Sharecross, an ex-cop who has made the transition from chasing killers to tracking rare books. One afternoon, the local sheriff interrupts his book club meeting, and Sharecross’s old career collides with his new one. The area’s premier book collector has been found bludgeoned to death on the floor of his family library. A fifth-generation resident of Good Advice, Lloyd Fister devoted his life to books, accumulating a collection of local history that date backs to the sixteenth century. In his library, a single volume is missing: a Spanish book with a sinister past. Is the missing volume a clue, a motive, or a murder weapon? It will take a collector’s eye to decide.

    The Bibliomysteries are a series of short tales about deadly books, by top mystery authors.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMysteriousPress.com Open Road
    Release dateMar 12, 2013
    ISBN9781480404304
    Book Club
    Author

    Loren D. Estleman

    Loren D. Estleman is the author of more than eighty novels, including the Amos Walker, Page Murdock, and Peter Macklin series. The winner of four Shamus Awards, five Spur Awards, and three Western Heritage Awards, he lives in Central Michigan with his wife, author Deborah Morgan.

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      Book preview

      Book Club - Loren D. Estleman

      CHIEF D OCKERTY knew the shadiest spot in New Mexico wasn’t the Santa Rita copper mine in Silver City. It was right there in the town of Good Advice, and it belonged to Avery Sharecross’ bookshop.

      Sharecross had established it, years before many of the residents were born, in a three-hundred-year-old mission that had been by turns a community theater, a Salvation Army shelter, a home for armadillos, and a place for juvenile delinquents to smoke cigarettes and listen to rock and roll. Its walls were adobe, three feet thick, its few windows just large enough to shoot Indians from inside without attracting too many arrows from outside. During its empty period, it had been as dark and mossy—feeling as a cave. Sharecross had managed to make it darker still by installing towering bookcases and stocking them with volumes, some the same vintage as the building, with narrow passages between the cases. Generations of children had dared one another to approach the place after dark, when the ghosts of William Shakespeare and Mark Twain prowled among the stacks (or during the day, when the proprietor did the haunting); none accepted. Even at high noon, a visitor needed a flashlight to explore the place without running into Thackeray or Gibbon and cracking a tooth.

      Fortunately for the chief’s new bridge, the bookseller had suspended trough lights from the distant ceiling, with chain switches for the convenience of browsers, who were requested by hand-lettered cardboard signs posted throughout the store to turn them off when they moved from one aisle to the next. The fluorescent tubes flickered and buzzed when activated and spilled watery illumination onto many centuries of literature, but not quite as far as the plank floor, which was heaped with books on both sides of the passages, narrowing the avenues even further. Dockerty groped his way forward with his feet to avoid kicking them over.

      The cases were ancient, built of old-growth oak from the East, and gray with the accumulation of dust that had worked its way

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