(courtesy Penguin Books Australia)
Cosy crime has become quite the thing in recent years, and while those unacquainted with the genre might wonder how something so awful could be considered in the same vein as warm fires, knitting and supportive found families, there’s something about combining cosiness and crime that indisputably works.
Perhaps it’s the fact that even as terrible things can and do happen, and evil lurks around every corner, that the characters in whatever the story may be, can find sanctuary in real crime from events that would otherwise leave them exposed and vulnerable.
Those elements are on clear display in The Bookshop Detectives: Tea and Cake and Death, the second book in the series by real-life New Zealand independent booksellers and ex-police Gareth Ward & Louise Ward (The Bookshop Detectives: Dead Girl Gone) which once again takes us to the Sherlock Tomes bookstore in the town of Havelock North, near Napier on the mid-east coast of the North Island.
Here Garth and Eloise, and their adorably rescue dog Stevie, who gets even more a role in this book to everyone’s great delight, are once again splitting their time between holding book clubs and author events and dealing with their quirky but devoted staff, while trying to work who’s poisoning people at the events at which they’re presenting.
Like the first book, there is a major event driving the timeline, in this case the Battle of the Book Clubs, a trivia fundraising event for a local cancer charity, the fate of which hangs in the balance as crime comes close to toppling bookselling as their main focus.
Garth sits up as I shuffle back into the room, a grin spreading across his mush. I smile back. He’s so chuffed at the thought of more mischief he might as well be rubbing his hands together in glee.
‘Excellent,’ he says, rubbing his hands together in glee.
But Garth and Eloise, who bear an uncanny resemblance to the authors, work overtime to be both bookselling centres of the community and crime solvers, drawing on their past as police detectives in the UK which is where they met before leaving their home country for a new life more than halfway across the globe.
In amongst the mystery they have to solve and the machinations of the event they have to plan, Garth and Eloise have to cope with the lingeringly malevolent shadow of Pinter, a serial killer from Eloise’s past who might be in jail in England but who continues to find ways to remind his onetime quarry that he can still reach and affect her even at a great remove.
That’s a LOT going on anfd you could be forgiven for wondering if The Bookshop Detectives: Tea and Cake and Death would feel like a pellmell rush through poisonings, crimes and lurking nasties from the past.
But somehow Gareth and Louise keep all of this ceaseless action tucked away in a story that celebrates the joys of belonging, connection and found family and small town life, every bit as much as it focuses on crime and its effects and throwing us tidbits so we can solve the crime at hand.
This reviewer didn’t of course but then that’s been a thing since he first encountered Agatha Christie novels, and while you could have a red hot go at playing sleuth too, the joy of The Bookshop Detectives: Tea and Cake and Death is watching Garth and Eloise do it in the warm, cosy embrace of the people and town they love.
In fact, while the Wards are happy to be brutally honest about how horrible crime can be and how devastating its effect on people and their sense of safety and security can be, The Bookshop Detectives: Tea and Cake and Death, there is a sense that for all the terrors and evils of the world that the love of good people can right a lot metric ton of wrongs.
That may sound simplistic but in the hands of these assured writers, it feels eminently real and sensible, and you emerge from the book, mystery solved (and cliffhanger looming; look out book three which surely must be on the way), feeling far from weighted down, instead assured that relying on those around you to stand in the gap, and for you to return the favour, even in the very worst of times, may be the best strategy of all.
The Bookshop Detectives: Tea and Cake and Death relies on the fact that while killers like Pinter and local poisoners may seem all powerful and destined to succeed because surely isn’t might always right, that that doesn’t mean they will.
Sure, they inflict real damage and Eloise especially but Garth too are haunted by the long darkening shadow Pinter cats, but they don’t win, not ultimately because love, far from being a fluffy sentiment on a greeting card, actually has real power to change things.
‘I know! I know what it is! Give me a pen.’ Eloise impressively rolls from the bed without spilling her wine, snatches the marker from my hand and draws a ring around [name redacted]. ‘The winning team of Battle gets to have dinner with [name redacted]. That’s when [name redacted]’s going to kill her.’
Central to proceedings if you are a book and bookshop lover, and the odds are good if you’re reading this novel, is the love letter it represents to what is many peoples’ happy place (this reviewer most emphatically included).
Everything in the story comes back to Sherlock Tomes in one way or another, whether it’s lovely staff of Phyllis, Kitty and Amelia doing their quirky but more than capable things or Garth and Eloise serving customers like the Admiral or steampunk goth author, Prudence, to name just two.
The love of books and the warm and inclusive places that sell them infuses every page of this delightful and emotionally substantial novel, which is funnier and warmer than you might expect and which feels nuanced and ruminative even as its narrative fills with all manner of twists and turns.
The Bookshop Detectives: Tea and Cake and Death is a joy for all the darkness that stalks Garth and Eloise because while the crime is front and centre, the cosiness is even more so but don’t mistake that as some some sign of fluffy weakness for this sense of being cosy comes with emotional muscles, tenacity and warmhearted endurance and it proves that love and connection and the power they bring are more than a match for whatever may come against it.