Brooklyn and her new hunky husband, Derek, are excited to be guests at Dharma’s first annual Book Festival. The entire town is involved and Brooklyn’s mom Rebecca is taking charge. In addition to all of her other event related duties, she’s got Brooklyn doing rare book appraisals and is also staging Little Women, the musical to delight the festival goers. If that wasn’t enough, she and Meg—Derek’s mom—will have a booth where they read palms and tarot cards.
Brooklyn couldn’t be prouder of her mom’s do-it-all attitude so when a greedy local businessman who seems intent on destroying Dharma starts harassing Rebecca, Brooklyn is ready to take him down. Rebecca is able to hold her own with the nasty jerk until one of her fellow festival committee members is brutally murdered and the money for the festival seems to have vanished into thin air.
Things get even more personal when one of Brooklyn’s nearest and dearest is nearly run down in cold blood. Brooklyn and Derek go into attack mode and the pressure is on to catch a spineless killer before they find themselves skipping the festival for a funeral.
Release Date: Jun 10, 2020
Series: A Bibliophile Mystery
Book: 14
Publisher: Penguin Group
Imprint: Berkley
Price: $13.99
Book restoration expert Brooklyn Wainwright is excited to return to her hometown of Dharma, California with her husband Derek. They are going to be assisting Brooklyn’s mother Rebecca with Dharma’s first book festival. In spite of some in-fights between committee members, the preparations are going well until Brooklyn’s mother and mother-in-law discover a dead body. When it looks like Rebecca, as well as Brooklyn, could be the next targets, Brooklyn is determined to find out who is behind the murder.
The Grim Reader is the fourteenth book in the Bibliophile series. I think fans of the series will enjoy the book more than new readers. I read two of the prior books in the middle of the series and still felt confused about who all the characters are. I like having the book take place during a book festival and since the town of Dharma is located in Northern California’s wine country, that makes a nice setting. In the other two books I’ve read in this series, what set them apart was the work Brooklyn did restoring books. I loved the detailed information about what is entailed and the books being restored were central to the story. In this installment, the parts that describe Brooklyn’s work on restoring a potentially valuable edition of a classic are well-done and very interesting. However, there were too few of these scenes and Brooklyn’s speciality seems to be an afterthought in the book which is disappointing.
I found much of the dialogue in the book to be over-the-top, both the arguments during the festival planning meetings, as well as the loving words between Brooklyn’s family members. Neither end of the spectrum seems realistic to me and takes up too much of the book without moving the plot forward. It’s nice to see a loving, supporting family but the praise between the characters becomes less meaningful when repeated over and over. When Brooklyn was working on solving the mystery or working on book restoring, I enjoyed the book. Things get more exciting as the story nears the conclusion and I really liked the dramatic, unexpected way the book ends. Fans of the series will especially enjoy the final touching scene between Brooklyn and Derek. After the story ends, a few recipes and a book group discussion guide follow.
~ Christine
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