The Charleston Letters
(2026)(The fourth book in the Bloomsbury Bookshop Mystery series)
A novel by Imogen Penrose
The cat will not get off the card index. The ghost has opinions about the window. And the body is on a library floor, under a marble bust that did not fall on its own.
Professor Ambrose Sharpe saw the Charleston letters in 1978, for one afternoon. So he always said.
He wrote four hundred pages about them.
No photograph. No footnote. No second reader.
He is killed three days before he stands up to quote them.
Cleo Marchmont sells second-hand books in Bloomsbury. She counts things.
Not one page says what the paper looked like.
A publisher with ninety-one thousand pounds in the ground. A scholar asking the same question since 1987. An editor who sat opposite him twice a week for twenty years and says he was told nothing.
One of them already knew what he was going to say.
The safest lie is the one nobody ever had to prove.
The Charleston Letters is the fourth Bloomsbury Bookshop Mystery. For readers of Lucy Connelly, Verity Bright, and Jackie Baldwin.
Genre: Mystery
Professor Ambrose Sharpe saw the Charleston letters in 1978, for one afternoon. So he always said.
He wrote four hundred pages about them.
No photograph. No footnote. No second reader.
He is killed three days before he stands up to quote them.
Cleo Marchmont sells second-hand books in Bloomsbury. She counts things.
Not one page says what the paper looked like.
A publisher with ninety-one thousand pounds in the ground. A scholar asking the same question since 1987. An editor who sat opposite him twice a week for twenty years and says he was told nothing.
One of them already knew what he was going to say.
The safest lie is the one nobody ever had to prove.
The Charleston Letters is the fourth Bloomsbury Bookshop Mystery. For readers of Lucy Connelly, Verity Bright, and Jackie Baldwin.
Genre: Mystery