The Bookseller of King Street: And Other Cases Richard Fairchild

A secondhand bookseller who remembers everything. A settlement with a very long memory. And a retired Fleet intelligence officer who cannot stop noticing things. In this third collection of cases, Commander Richard Fairchild (Ret.) and his sister Margaret encounter the particular hazards of living in a place that has been in the same location long enough to accumulate secrets - not through conspiracy, but through the ordinary persistence of the past. A rare legal volume has been quietly altered, and two farming families have been living with the wrong boundary for twenty years. A widow's husband played his violin every Thursday for fifty years - but someone has been borrowing it since he died. A harbour pilot has been signalling a lost ship for thirty-one years, and someone has finally started to answer. A celebrated mystery novelist arrives to research colonial policing, asks questions that are a little too good, and leaves before anyone can be certain what she was actually looking for. And then there is the parcel from Fleet Archives - two notebooks inside, an inventory that clearly states three, and an official reply that insists the third never existed. Joining Rick, Margaret, Inspector Pritchard, and Dr. Alice Merriweather in this volume is Edwin Pevensey, proprietor of Pevensey & Sons Booksellers - a man who has been on King Street for thirty years, who knows every family in the settlement, and who occasionally says exactly one sentence that changes the direction of everything. Seven cases. One bookseller. And a past that will not stay neatly filed. Perfect for fans of classic detective fiction, cosy mysteries with intelligence and depth, and stories set in richly imagined worlds where the puzzle matters as much as the people solving it.