Death of a Bookseller

By: Alice Slater

Narrated by: Rachael Beresford, Sasha Higgins

Roach would rather be listening to the latest episode of her favorite true crime podcast than assisting the boring and predictable customers at her local branch of the bookstore Spines, where she's worked her entire adult life. A serious true crime junkie, Roach looks down her nose at the pumpkin-spice-latte-drinking casual fans who only became interested in the genre once it got trendy. But when Laura, a pretty and charismatic children's bookseller, arrives to help rejuvenate the struggling bookstore branch, Roach recognizes in her an unexpected kindred spirit.

Despite their common interest in true crime, Laura keeps her distance from Roach, resisting the other woman's overtures of friendship. Undeterred, Roach learns everything she can about her new colleague, eventually uncovering Laura's traumatic family history. When Roach realizes that she may have come across her very own true crime story, interest swiftly blooms into a dangerous obsession.

A darkly funny suspense novel, Death of a Bookseller raises ethical questions about the fervor for true crime and how we handle stories that don't belong to us.

©2023 Alice Slater (P)2023 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Well that was creepy!

I still don’t know yet if Death of a Bookseller was creepy good or creepy bad. I do know it will be living rent free in my head for much too long. Certainly Alice Slater accomplished everything she intended with both of the main characters. Her deft grasp on the threads of trauma and the mental illness that drives character actions is thought provoking. Also, FINALLY there’s a book that calls attention to the way the “true crime” fad has warped reality and pulled attention from the victims in favor of the criminals. Good for Slater!

Blahhhhhhh

Should have been 3hr long at most. Too long with not much happening. Did not need that much back story

Two Stars for The Book Shop Setting & Four for Narration

Spoiler alert…I won’t give away any plot details, but to review and give my opinion properly, I will reveal the one thing that for me made this book a waste of time.

Choose to read on, or not.

I am a murder mystery reader. I do occasionally venture into other genres, but when I choose to spend money on a book titled “Death of a [insert character here], I expect just that…and a mystery at the very least.

Instead, I have just spent money and hours on a tale of two colleagues - one who is bereft of any empathy for others, likely a psychopath, and spends the entire book behaving horribly and driving the other to her wits’ end. Magically, (how??), all’s well that ends well in the last hour, and I realized I had just been conned into wasting time and a credit on a non-mystery that wasn’t even remotely interesting.

I will say that the narration was fine, and that – along with the book shop setting – kept this book from landing firmly in 1-star land for me.

Love how much I hate it.

Two unlikable characters and a plot that often felt like it was going nowhere would normally be a DNF for me. This was a train wreck of a book, and I had to finish it. Huge spoiler: NO ONE DIES. I have no idea what a better title would have been, but do wish that had been spoiled for me so I could manage expectations.

But I am giving it high marks for how intensely it made me feel about these two horrible women.

Wanted to like it, but ugh…

I really wanted to like this book, and I slugged it through to the end. But how can I like a book with such unlikeable characters? The story dragged and I got tired of the pretentiousness of the Laura character and the uber creepiness of the Roach character. Sorry I wasted a credit on this one.