When Ellie Christie moved back home to Colorado, to run the family’s bookstore with her older sister, she was anticipating a quiet bookish life. She had left after high school to experience more of the world. She had managed a beachside bookshop on a South Pacific resort island and was a private librarian for a antiquarian book collector in London. But when her parents decided they wanted to retire from the Book Chalet, Ellie moved back home and took up residence in the loft apartment over the shop.
She gets there just in time to help with the latest book club. Longtime bookseller Ms. Ridge is leading the discussion, but the group is quickly taken over by former actor and current internet bookish celebrity Morgan Marin, who wants to recreate a scene from the book, a séance. As she has her assistant pull out the Ouija board and set it up, Morgan talks about her excitement for the book, Agatha Christie’s The Sittaford Mystery.
Ms. Ridge excuses herself to make coffee for everyone, and Ellie is distracted by a noise that sounded like someone in the shop. The Book Chalet isn’t open yet, so she looks through the store to try to figure out if someone is there. But she can still hear Morgan and the book club, yelling out the letters that the Ouija board is spelling. D. E. A. D.
Ellie finds a strange man in the store, and he explains that he was supposed to meet “Cece” there. But there’s no one in the store by that name, and Ellie asks him to leave. He does, as Morgan’s voice continues to ring out. M. A. N.
Ellie goes back to the kitchen to find Ms. Ridge is gone. A search of the store doesn’t turn up the missing woman, which Ellie and her sister Meg agree is very unusual. And as they ride the gondola down the mountain later, to the town where Meg lives with her daughter Rosie and the sisters’ grandmother, they see the man again. He rushes into the gondola car ahead of them. But then something goes terribly wrong, because when he gets to the end of the bottom of the ride, he can’t get out of the car. The gondolier stops everything to try to help the man, but it’s no use.
The man is dead.
Ellie and Meg are determined to figure out who the man is, why he had been in their store, and who killed him. When it comes out that he was a disgraced financial advisor who had been sent to jail for defrauding investors, the suspect list becomes a little clearer. But some of those suspects hit a little close to home, to friends of the Chalet. And when someone breaks in to the bookshop, to make off with the bag that the dead man had left behind, Ellie and Meg feel that the crimes are hitting too close to home for comfort.
In order to protect their family’s bookstore and their favorite patrons, Ellie and Meg, along with Rosie and Gram, start their own investigation. But as they dig deeper, uncovering secrets and lies, they come closer and closer to a killer. Will they be able to find the answers they are looking for before a killer comes looking for them?
Dead and Gondola is a fun new Agatha-Christie-laden mystery set in the snowy mountains of Colorado. The Christie family is a close-knit group who look out for each other and those they care about. There is a grumpy store cat named Agatha who tends to steal all the scenes she’s in, and a group of locals who are full of personality. The mountain setting is charming, and the author trivia adds an extra bit of interest to the story.
I really enjoyed Dead and Gondola. I thought it was fun and creative. It starts really strong, and while I did get a little bogged down in the middle, I still wanted to get to the end of the story. I love this Christie family, and I hope that we readers will have more opportunities to visit the Book Chalet as they do more Marpling and solve more crimes (and for Agatha, eat more cat treats). But mostly I want to sit in a quiet corner of this bookshop and read a good mystery.
Egalleys for Dead and Gondola were provided by Bantam Books through NetGalley, with many thanks.
