I grew up on this island. I know every rock, cove, and grassy dune. Brigid’s is a small island where the tourists flock every year. Some residents hate it–others capitalize on it, like my mom, Hildy. She was the owner of Beach Reads, a romance and mystery-themed bookstore on our boardwalk. Exactly the kind of books I don’t like.

But Mom’s gone now. She died quickly and mysteriously. My return to my home island isn’t a happy one. As I try to make sense of everything, I find nothing makes sense–from the fact that she was a healthy 64-year-old woman and just dropped dead, to the weird fact that she’s being remembered in a church. I love church and belong to one in Virginia, where I live. But Mom? Nah, she was all about the goddess and embraced her pagan ways.

Mom wasn’t very happy with me when she died, which makes this grief of mine all the more difficult. She said I was running away from my problems. She was right, but I needed distance. When a video of you goes viral and becomes a national joke, the humiliation is paralyzing. And when your dean lets you know he’s not happy about how it reflects on the university, what else to do but go to England and research your next book?

The thing is, I was on shaky ground with the dean anyway, (Now, that’s a whole other story!) I fell in love with Shakespeare as a teenager and all I’ve ever wanted to do is teach other people about him. I wanted to be a professor. And here I am, finding my job isn’t exactly what I dreamed it would be. And then some privileged student finds out about my arachnophobia and frees the huge spiders from the lab in the next room, and films my reaction. Which, with some distance, I have to admit, was funny.

But what’s not funny is that I sleep with a nylon mask over my face so that spiders won’t get in my nose, mouth, or ears when I’m sleeping, I won’t go into basements and attics for fear of running into one, and I certainly don’t go camping. My phobia rules my life in those ways. The dean is making me get therapy to get to the bottom of it. Does he not think I’ve been down this road before?

In any case, it’s only an hour a week and it’s online, because now I’m back on the island dealing with family, friends, and some folks who aren’t so friendly. My mom created a close-knit group of book-loving friends, who are all impatiently waiting to see what I do with Beach Reads. I’ll let them know–when I figure it out. But first, I really need to know what happened to my mom.

Little Bookshop of Murder is the first book in the NEW “Beach Reads” cozy mystery series, released September 8, 2020.

A Shakespearean scholar inherits a beachside bookshop–and a murder mystery–in this delightful new cozy series for fans of Kate Carlisle and Ellery Adams.

Summer Merriweather’s career as a Shakespeare professor hangs by a bookbinder’s thread. Academic life at her Virginia university is a viper’s pit, so Summer spends her summer in England, researching a scholarly paper that, with any luck, will finally get her published, impress the Dean, and save her job. But her English idyll ends when her mother, Hildy, shuffles off her mortal coil from an apparent heart attack.

Returning to Brigid’s Island, NC, for the funeral, Summer is impatient to settle the estate, sell her mom’s embarrassingly romance-themed bookstore, Beach Reads, and go home. But as she drops by Beach Reads, Summer finds threatening notes addressed to Hildy: “Sell the bookstore or die.”

Clearly, something is rotten on Brigid’s Island. What method is behind the madness? Was Hildy murdered? The police insist there’s not enough evidence to launch a murder investigation. Instead, Summer and her Aunt Agatha screw their courage to the sticking place and start sleuthing, with the help of Hildy’s beloved book club. But there are more suspects on Brigid’s Island than are dreamt of in the Bard’s darkest philosophizing. And if Summer can’t find the villain, the town will be littered with a Shakespearean tragedy’s worth of corpses–including her own.

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Meet the author
Maggie Blackburn is the author of the Cora Crafts Mysteries, the Cumberland Creek Mysteries, and the Buttermilk Creek Mysteries under another name. She’s an Agatha Award and Daphne du Maurier Award finalist. Her books have been shortlisted for the Virginia Library Award for fiction and have been named as a Top Ten Beach Read by Woman’s World. Both of her daughters are following their dreams in the music business and she resides in Waynesboro, Va.

All comments are welcomed.