Bound for the Bonfire

This audiobook is narrated by an AI Voice. Little Fernsbury is the kind of Cotswolds village that holds its breath for Bonfire Night. Honey-coloured stone, a pub with a roaring fire, and a bonfire committee that has been arguing about the pallets since August. Clementine Ashby, known to everyone as Clem, has run the family bookshop since her father died. Ashby & Daughter sells secondhand and antiquarian books, and its most reliable resident is Bartleby, a large grey cat who sleeps in the window on the paperbacks and would prefer not to be disturbed. On the morning the clocks go back, Clem climbs the narrow stone stairs to the old parish library above the church porch. Rufus Hartnell, the sharp-tongued rare book expert from the auction house in Cheltenham, had asked her to meet him there at nine, for a second pair of eyes. She finds him at the foot of the staircase. His notebook is nowhere to be found. Detective Sergeant Jonah Okafor is polite, thorough and visibly allergic to cats. He has questions for everyone in the village, and Clem has more questions than answers. But a bookseller learns to read what other people overlook: paper, paste and thread, a page that has grown, a habit that has broken. With the bonfire still to be built, Clem must collate the clues, one leaf at a time, before the truth goes up in smoke. Bound for the Bonfire is the first book in The Little Fernsbury Bookshop Mysteries, a cosy crime series for anyone who loves an English village mystery with a bookshop, a cat in the window and a thoroughly likeable amateur sleuth. Settle in with a cup of tea. Autumn has come to the Cotswolds.