Alice Slater, you are a little genius! This book has everything, it’s dark, it’s gory and grimy, it’s fast paced, and it’s also got that quintessential British humour and relatable-ness which I adore.

The world of the antiquarian book trade was fascinating and a complete revelation to me. Being written and set in the 1950s also added to the appeal of this book. The historical details were fascinating and I enjoyed spending a few hours there. The language and behaviour of the characters was of its time and was at once more formal and polite – but also ruthless and cut-throat. The mystery was well written and I found myself unable to decide who to trust. I was hooked. If you think this going to be a cute cozy mystery set in a bookshop ( I’m partial to stories set in libraries and bookshops), just take a look at that cover (which I love, by the way)!According to Martin Edwards in the Introduction to this reprint, original copies of the novel are much sought after and the story has cult status among book lovers. Surely that can only be because of the huge amounts of information on book collecting, bookselling and arcane books which it contains, since it could hardly be said to have appeal for lovers of stylish writing, tight plotting and solid detective investigation. Laura, even her name exudes sighs of happiness, and sun-drenched blondness - a Pumpkin Spice Girl if there ever was one, now works at the same chain bookstore as Roach.

I feel like she's circling me. She's always there, always watching me, always trying to get my attention." she says. But Laura (our other POV) and the object of Roach’s obsession has no interest in being friends with her. Having suffered from the trauma of losing her mother at the hands of a serial killer, Laura is physically repulsed by Roach’s fascination with serial killers and avoids all overtures of friendship. There’s no need for a sequel, but I kind of want one. I want to see what happened next and what the future held for our characters. Roach feels Laura is as interested in the morbid and macabre as she is even though Laura’s contempt for Roach is obvious but she is determined to know everything about her life regardless of the consequences.At the end of the book, Roach gets away with everything. Nothing happens to her. And Laura? The victim? She is seen as the person who went crazy and caused all this drama. That everything was always in her head. I have never hated a book from beggining, middle, end, as much as I did this one.

Harry Bosch and the Lincoln Lawyer team up to exonerate a woman who’s already served five years for killing her ex-husband. When Sergeant Wigan stops to escort a swaying reveler home at the end of his late shift, he is spun a tale of the ups and downs of a life spent collecting and selling rare books. His new companion, Michael Fisk, has been celebrating the acquisition of a signed copy of Keats’ Endymion, and a trip into Fisk’s library is enough to convince Wigan to begin his own collection. After developing a love for antiquarian books and a friendship with Fisk, Wigan is called upon by the C.I.D. when tragedy strikes and Fisk is found murdered in his library. Very dark, character-driven, slow-burn suspense … Slater explores the ethics surrounding our obsession with true crime and questions how we should handle other people’s stories. This highly original, whip-smart first novel will have crime lovers second-guessing their next read.” With an uncanny ability to say the wrong thing (and genuinely just creep everyone out with her laser like fixation on death) Roach is a bit of a loner, which she seems perfectly happy about until Laura joins the branch, a model employee who manages to charm everyone around her. Including Roach, who, after hearing one of Laura’s poems at a mic night (in which she aims to honour the victims of violent crime instead of dehumanising them) believes she has found a kindred spirit and becomes obsessed with the idea of their friendship. Farmer does a great job of recreating the mania and tension that grips the committed runners and collectors as they elbow each other out of the way while searching through piles of newly arrived books. Aside from his detective novels, Farmer also wrote a biography of GA Henty, so it comes as no surprise that many of the bookish conversations Wigan becomes involved in concern the collecting of Henty’s books.As with others, I found the occult theme a bit off putting, but I can only assume that this too, along with the insights into police and justice procedures, and the seamier side of the book trade, may be a lesser known aspect of the time that Farmer had personal experience of.