Murder on Book Row

She sells books, eats well, and has a very large brain.

Criminals fear her.

Meet Beatrice Valentine, a larger-than-life bookshop owner with a penchant for three things in abundance—delicious Italian food, vino, and murder. For decades she has sold used and rare books from her stylish-but-cluttered domain on New York City’s legendary Book Row.

But when the eccentric antiques-and-books dealer next door is found dead, it’s time to put down the cannoli and get to work. Aided by her long-suffering private eye nephew, Aunt Bea launches an investigation using her irrepressible talents for snooping, meddling, and outthinking the police. Pitted against Aunt Bea’s brilliant deductions, murderers don’t stand a chance.

Written by a winner of the Derringer Award for Short Mystery Fiction, Murder on Book Row is the first in a delightful series of light-hearted whodunnits set in a world of rare books and abundant snacks.

If you like charming puzzle mysteries, witty banter, and fiendishly clever solutions, you’ll love getting to know the Book Lady.

Get Murder on Book Row today and delve into a page-turning case that’s one for the books!

BUY MURDER ON BOOK ROW

Chapter 1

On the fifth day of the New Year, my Aunt Beatrice adhered strictly to her usual morning schedule. She rose at five, read a book till six, was showered and dressed by six thirty. By seven she headed north on her morning constitutional toward the colorful streets of Greenwich Village. 

Aunt Bea is fond of saying that she walks briskly every morning to keep in shape. But I can’t say this approach has yielded sterling results. Her shape and carriage hasn’t changed one bit in thirty years.

The weather had been miserable these last few weeks, with rain, sleet, or snow in irritating abundance. It was officially The Winter Everyone Hated. After only minutes of traipsing through the slush, Bea sought the comforts of the warm, butter-scented interior of Anzotti’s Bakery on Thompson Street. She barreled up to the display case and began surveying the morning pastries. Behind the glass counter she saw everything from coffee cakes and English muffins to turnovers and sixteen types of doughnuts, cream and jelly-filled. They even had an international delights counter, complete with little paper flags of the world’s pastry-loving nations. My aunt’s eye beheld Irish soda bread, Mexican flan, Viennese strudel, not to mention Italian grostoli, cannoli, strufoli, sfogliatelle, biscotti, farfallette dolci, amaretti, panettone, and pasticcini. 

Aunt Bea inspected all these things and said, “I’ll take three prune Danish.”

In other words, her usual order.

She got one for herself, the others for her two longtime business associates, Amos Horne and Milo Barski. 

“That one looks a little flat,” she said, rapping the counter with her knuckles. 

“This one?” said the salesgirl, peering over the top. She knew my aunt by sight. Bea was the tall woman of a certain age, with a single stripe of white running through her thick, jet-black hair. She wore a wide-brimmed wool hat, a green puffy down jacket, a thick orange cardigan, and a flowery garment that some would charitably call a caftan and others would call a sheet.

You might say that my aunt is legendary in this neighborhood. A legendary pain in the butt.

“You talking about this one?” the salesgirl said, waiting.

My aunt smiled. The sales clerk was a sleepy little thing, flour-faced and pimply, but Bea had no patience for her chicanery. “No,” she said, rapping again. “The one you slipped in the bag when you thought I was looking at the Bundt cakes.” 

“You want another one?” the girl said.

“If you’re asking if I’d like the offending Danish replaced with a plumper one, then yes, I would.”

The girl rolled her eyes and made the switch. My aunt said later that she was glad she’d spoken up. She knew Milo and Amos would kick up a fuss if their pastries were second rate. Had she known what was in store for her, she would have skipped the munchies altogether.

She left the bakery, unfolded her gigantic umbrella—the one with the pink-and-yellow duck print—and walked a few blocks in the freezing rain to Broadway and Eighth Street, where she waited at the top of the subway steps. She glanced at her watch. It was 8:04 a.m. Amos was late. Figures. It was six minutes later, 8:10 a.m. precisely, when she spotted her arthritic friend slowly climbing the steps to the sidewalk.

He was a small, neat, elderly man with a bristly gray moustache, wearing a tan overcoat and thick red scarf looped around his neck. On his head was a jaunty blue beret, dripping rain from its little tail. He looked ready to burst into “La Marseillaise.” He said, “You been waiting long?”

Bea said no, of course not. She’d just gotten there. She used one of her oversized pink handkerchiefs to wipe droplets of rain from her face, and they were off. They walked four blocks up and two over to Fourth Avenue. My aunt unlocked the door of Book Lady & Friends Bookshop, and stepped into a cavernous space filled with used and rare books that stretched from floor to ceiling. It’s the sort of place that makes you feel as though you’ve fallen into a well whose walls are lined with paper and ink.

Scented geraniums grow in the front windows in such profusion that they have pressed their thick leaves across the glass and climbed ever upward, blocking the view of all but the tallest of passersby. The ceiling is the original tin, painted bright screaming yellow. There’s a front checkout area with a cash register, a table to wrap purchases and sort new acquisitions, and a little conversation area in the back left corner, presided over by a giant spinning globe and a surly bronze bust of Giuseppe Verdi.

Theoretically the bookstore carries a volume on every subject under the sun, but you don’t have to look far to glean my aunt’s true area of expertise—and her passion. The most striking thing about the Book Lady bookshop is the fully stocked demo kitchen situated at the back half of the store. There, cast-iron skillets and copper pots dangle overhead and threaten to brain anyone who wanders too close.

My aunt installed the kitchen decades ago, at a time when many of her culinary heroes still lived and thought nothing of stopping by the shop to sign old copies of their backlist cookbooks and whip up a soufflé while they were at it. I remember one time walking in to find my aunt in deep conversation with Julia Child and Craig Claiborne. Each of them was wearing a pair of white gloves and taking turns carefully paging through some old book on culinary herbs that Aunt Bea had scored on a buying trip to London. The book later sold to a collector in Chappaqua for an undisclosed sum, but not before Child, Claiborne, and Aunt Bea made a careful transcription of the “receipts” preserved in those fragile brown pages.

Fourth Avenue’s Book Row was like that once, a mile-long string of bookshops that was a tourist destination unto itself, drawing bibliophiles from all over the world. It was said that it could take you an entire Saturday to work your way down one end of the avenue to the other and back up again, browsing through store after store with all their little specialties. Once, there had been stores that sold nothing but travel books and maps, stores that specialized in biographies, ones that carried the poshest art and coffee table books you’ve ever seen, and ones that cared for nothing but poetry, the stranger the better.

Years ago, the city had strangely decreed that the booksellers could no longer sell from carts on the sidewalk. They were a public menace! They blocked the flow of pedestrians! Anyone found in violation of that ordinance would be fined. Most booksellers complied, but after those long New York winters, who could blame them if they rolled out a cart or two on the first warm days of spring? In seconds, thanks to a couple of stir-crazy bookmen and ladies, that little stretch of New York City looked like Paris. I gather it must have been a pretty sweet thing to shop for books while the sun warmed your back and the planetrees on the sidewalk unfurled their crimson bulbous flowers.

But that magical world had largely faded into the past. One by one, many stores closed due to rising rents and unsympathetic landlords, until there were just a few left. Hangers-on like my aunt and a few others.

She stood in the kitchen now—that crazy wide hat still on her head—firing up the temperamental espresso machine and setting out the store-bought pastries on mismatched plates of bone china. As she started the first of her morning cappuccinos, she peered over the kitchen counter toward the front of the store.

Amos Horne stood in the doorway with a frown on his face. “You know,” he said, “that’s peculiar.”

“What is?”

“You know how he’s always in before us? Well, he’s not.”

“Nonsense. He’s always in.”

Amos threw up his hands. “What can I tell you?”

Aunt Bea glanced at her watch: 8:19 a.m. She switched off the espresso machine and stepped out of her shop with Amos to the storefront next door. She stopped when she saw that the ribbed metal security door in front of M. BARSKI ANTIQUES was down.

“How strange!” she said. “The door’s down but the padlocks are missing.” 

“Maybe he forgot something at home,” Amos said.

My aunt waved that remark away as if it weren’t worth her time. She slid up the metal like a garage door, revealing the darkened windows of Barski’s shop. In the window she saw the usual: odd pieces of furniture and ceramics doing their darndest to look desirable. My aunt peered once through the window and said, “Oh dear.”

“What?” Amos said. “What’s oh dear, dear?”

Aunt Bea tried the door. It was locked. But the light on the little box attached to the door was dimmed, indicating that the security alarm was off. She excused herself momentarily and returned to her shop. She emerged seconds later, swinging wood.

“What’s that?”

“This, Amos, is what is known as a Louisville Slugger. Kindly get out of my way, please.”

“What are you gonna do with that?”

“Well,” my aunt said, “seeing as the Mets haven’t exactly picked up my contract this year, I guess I’m going to have to take my game elsewhere. Are you moving?”

Amos scurried to the street, fiddling with his scarf. 

“Thank you.”

Beatrice took a few preparatory swings, stepped up to the imaginary plate, and proceeded to smack a line drive through the glass window of Barski’s shop door. The time was 8:22 a.m. 

“Goodness, you’re nuts!” Amos yelped. He watched Aunt Bea wrap her hand in her damp handkerchief, reach in and unlock the door. Then she stepped into the shop.

“Milo …?” she called.

She took two steps before clapping the handkerchief to her mouth. Amos was right behind her. They entered the cluttered kingdom of one Milo Barski, miser, Jack of all trades, grouch. Amid pricy relics of the past, they found a Milo sprawled out on his back under a stack of books. He looked as if someone had taken a Louisville Slugger to the side of his head. There was a good deal of blood.

Amos gulped twice, his moustache twitching. “Oh sweet mother of God. Is he …?”

My aunt bent once to touch Milo. The temperature of the poor fellow’s cheek told her everything she needed to know. She straightened up and nodded. “Don’t touch a thing. Come with me! We can call the police from my place. Heavens, what terrible timing! Who’s going to eat that extra Danish?”

That’s how I got invited to breakfast.