The Quaint Bookshop in Norcester High Street is the home to a reading group – not a book group – consisting of Professor Stone, a retired professor of Mathematics (yay), Lauren Sherwood, a would-be writer, Harrison Fforde, a very out-of-work actor and new recruit Bella Bourton. Assembled over the course of a year by the stop manager Felicity Penman, it is directly after leaving Bella’s first meeting that a scream is heard, and Felicity is found dead, slumped between the shelves, beaten to death with the Complete Works Of Ellery Queen. (Yes, I’ll come back to that in a bit).

When packages arrive separately for the four members containing possible clues to Felicity’s murderer, they decide that it’s up to them to solve her murder, as the police aren’t exactly making any progress. Well, unless you count arresting one of the reading group, that is…

So I was reading a review e-copy of A Game Of Murder, the second book in this series and was enjoying it, so when at about 30% of the way through I spotted the first one for 99p on Kindle, I thought I’d stop the new one for now and go back to the beginning.

After the opening, this book felt like I was being challenged. It begins with the denouement of the book the group are reading, the Lord Quaint mystery, Delivery Of Death. It’s an odd chapter as it’s clearly written for someone who hasn’t read the rest of the book, with plenty of explanations as to who the characters are which someone who had read the whole book would know. And the title gives away the murderer. Anyway, the point about this is that when the group discuss the title, the main criticism of the book is that the murderer appears out of nowhere and isn’t clued. So clearly the author of this actual book is saying that this isn’t the case here. Which, to my ears, means “Game On!”

I did enjoy this a lot, despite nothing much happening in the first half of the book. The characters are all good company – the chapters rotate viewpoints around the four of them – and each has their own stories to develop, especially Stone and Bella.

The clues… well, there’s some oddness about the plot. The clues are the titles of five crime novels, at least one of which would seem to indicate that the sender knew what was going to happen in the future, despite it being a spur of the moment thing when it happens. The second death seemed odd, as it removed a character who seemed to have potential to do more than they were allowed to.

Yes, there’s some real oddness with the actions of the victim which does deflate the finale a bit, and, if I’m being fair, there aren’t exactly many suspects knocking around. Our heroes tend to blunder into the solution rather than exactly solve it.

But I did enjoy the book a lot and I can see potential in this series. I’ll let you know how the second one pans out next month.

Oh, and the Complete Works Of Ellery Queen, if you just consider the books written by Dannay & Lee, consists of at least twenty-seven novels and three collections of short stories. No wonder hitting someone with this killed them, although I’d have expected the murderer to be caught at the scene of the crime having at the very least put their back out trying to lift such a weighty tome…