Quiet Neighbours

This was good. I have had this book on my tbr for years but for one reason or another, I just never got around to it until now. It took me a minute to really get into the book but once I did, I couldn’t wait to find out what really happened. This book was jam-packed with mysteries and every one of them captured my attention completely.

In this book, you start out not knowing a whole lot about what is going on with any of the characters. With each piece of information presented, I quickly realized just how much I had to learn. Jude needs to get away from everything and ends up in a quaint little bookshop run by Lowell that needs some work and Jude is just the person for the job. I liked all of the characters in this book and couldn’t show more wait to learn their story. In this small little town, everyone seems to know everybody but everyone also seems to be keeping a lot of secrets. The book took a lot of twists and turns, some I guessed, while others came as a complete shock.

I would definitely recommend this book to others. I thought that it was a well-done mystery with a quirky and likable cast of characters. I would not hesitate to read more of Catriona McPherson’s work in the future.

I received a digital review copy of this book from Midnight Ink. show less

The first few pages got me hooked, and I couldn't put the book down. When June flees from her life and a secret in London, she finds rescue and a friendly face in a small bookshop. Soon, she's in over her head sorting out the mess of books filling up the store, an easy task for a professional librarian. But while doing so, she stumbles about several volumes carrying diary-like notes in them. When she moves to a little cottage which she soon learns belonged to the man who owned those books, she starts investigating what mystery he kept hidden in his cryptic entries. When a young pregnant woman shows up in the shop some day, claiming to be Lowell's (the store owner) daughter, things become even more complicated.

I loved the beginning - the show more description of the messy bookshop, June's and Lowell's shared passion for books - it was the perfect setting for a great story to unfold. When Eddy showed up, the story took a turn and suddenly, there were three mysteries to solve - what happened to June in London, what is Eddy's story and what happened in the past to make the town people so nervous?

While I doubted Eddy's true motives for a long while (just as June did) and found her character less intriguing than June or Lowell, at the end everything made sense, and the solution was not one I would have guessed too easily. This unexpected, wonderfully twisted and almost, but not too cozy mystery taking place in and around a bookshop made a perfect read.

(I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review) show less

Jude is on the run, but from what? She expects the police to be pursuing her, but we do not learn why until near the end. She returns to a town in which she had visited a used bookstore and is befriended by the owner. A young, pregnant woman shows up claiming to be the store owner's daughter, of whose existence he had been unaware. While sorting books Jude notices brief notes in the flyleaves of certain books which turn out to have belonged to the deceased resident of the cottage in which she is living. When she mentions some of the names of people named strange things start to happen. Mystery piles upon mystery until all is suddenly unraveled. Interesting but frustrating at times.

I almost didn’t give this book a try. I had previously read Come To Harm by the same author and wasn’t impressed enough to give it anything above 2-stars. I felt her writing style was clipped and disjointed in that novel. Quiet Neighbors felt like it was written by a different author. The writing was fluid and descriptive. The characters were well thought out and the plot was easy to follow. I loved the mystery and was anxious to get to the finish line to see it wrapped up. This gave me hope enough to read more of her novels.

3.5 The dark atmosphere usually present in McPherson's stand alones is missing from this one. Yet, Quiet Neighbors has its own attractions. A musty old bookstore called Lowland Glen, some awesome characters, a now dead old man who wrote secrets in the books he read for a bookclub, and secrets, plenty of secrets. All the characters have one but only one has a secret that was deadly.

Enjoyed this one, it was fun. All the books, seeing how it all plays out, sometimes funny, like a comedy of errors. One secret is unraveled which leads to another being presented. Such a good writer, seem to like whatever she writes, but the characters and the setting definitely made this one special. So not dark, nor really insidiously evil, though there was show more evil done in the past, just a different type of mystery. Guess the dead do talk.

ARC from Netgalley. show less

The story opens with Jude fleeing London. She's grief-stricken, feeling utterly alone, and has made a decision so bad she fears the police are hot on her trail. She runs to the last place she felt safe and happy: Lowland Glen, a secondhand bookshop nestled in a small Scottish village. There, she attempts to start a new life but discovers her new beginning may not be as clean as she expected.

A lot of Jude's time is spent in the bookshop, cleaning and organizing, so if you love books filled with books, you won't be disappointed on that count.

Quiet Neighbors is for those who want a cozy-ish mystery in which nearly every character has secrets. However, don't expect anything shocking; the reveals will be fairly predictable to any experienced show more mystery reader.

3 stars
(because I wasn't a fan of the ending Jude (early 40s) and Lowell (late 60s) are a couple; everyone's one big happy family. show less

Book source ~ NetGalley

Jude runs away from London when something bad happens. She was going to fly somewhere far away, but when she gets to the train station on her way out of town, she remembers this old whacky bookshop she visited in this tiny out of the way town and decides to run there instead. What she finds is more than she bargained for and she has to figure out this dinky town’s secrets as well as solve another mystery about her employer, all while staying off the grid and away from the authorities.

There are three mysteries going on in this story and they are all fascinating. Unfortunately, they are the only thing that kept me going. I had to know the answers. If this is the writing style of this author then I will not be show more reading any more. I hate the style. It’s slapdash and sloppy. There are a million “oh dears” and “my, my my” and other such exclamations. The conversations are really hard to follow with all the local slang and such. Quite tedious and supremely irritating. The writing style does not make it any easier. I only give this a rating of two for the mysteries which are eventually spelled out in a somewhat coherent way. Otherwise, blerg. show less