Series Update: Secret Bookcase

So back in November last year I did a post about Ellie Alexander’s Secret Bookcase series after the release of book four, but this week the final book in the series, A Body at the Book Fair, came out and I wanted to return for a quick update. First a recap of the set up: Annie works at a specialist mystery bookshop in a small town in California, but she actually trained as a criminologist before her best friend was murdered during their final project. In each book in the series she’s solving a murder of the week, but also inching closer to solving the mystery of what happened to her friend.

Back in November, I was getting fed up with waiting for the resolution of the murder and enjoying the murders of the week more. And as the series went on on, the mysteries the books have been trying to solve seemed to get less complex because of the need to move the other story on. But until the final instalment, the books had had mostly been satisfying on one front or the other: either the murder of the week was good or the progress on the background investigation made up for it. But in book six I’m not sure either side of the story works – the mystery-of-the-week is very thin, and the background mystery felt a bit anticlimactic too, for reasons which I can’t really explain without giving you spoilers.

At the end of the final book there is a note from Ellie Alexander saying that there is a spin off series coming in 2026 called The Novel Detectives, featuring Annie and her friends. And as I still like the characters and the set up, I’m hoping that this will be much more of a the murder of the week but with developments in their personal lives as the running strand and will get back to what I liked about the earlier books. I’ll be looking out for the first one anyway and will keep you posted!