they never asked themselves if they should
Delaney Nichols has been living in Edinburgh for many years, long enough to get settled in to a good job at The Cracked Spine, a specialty bookstore. She’s been there long enough to fall in love and get married. But she still remembers where she came from, Lawrence, Kansas. She got her education at the University of Kansas (Rock Chalk, Jayhawk!). So when a fellow Kansan shows up in Edinburgh, Delaney is looking forward to talking about her alma mater.
She meets him for a minute as he was leaving artist Ryory Bennigan’s studio. As part of the annual Hidden Door Festival, Delaney and her husband Tom had gotten a rare invitation to visit the studio and see how Ry made his art, most notably his sculptures. Dr. Adam Pace was just leaving. Delaney invited him to drop by her bookstore, but he never makes it.
Delaney finds out that she and Dr. Pace had some friends in common, so she starts asking around. She wants to know why he was in Edinburgh, to try to figure out who would have a motive to kill him. Talking to old friends back in Kansas and newer friends in town, she finds out that he may have been trying to sell some dinosaur bones that he didn’t have the proper provenance for. He was also doing research on the Picts, a lost Scottish population of warriors. They left behind stones carved with symbols which scientists have been trying to decode.
As Delaney reaches out to her friends in town, going to other bookstores and tracking down a tattoo artist, she learns more about the paleontologist from Kansas. But she also learns about a couple of suspicious illnesses. Is it possible that the killer is not done yet? And is Delaney putting herself right in the killer’s sights?
Written in Stone is book ten in Paige Shelton’s Scottish Bookshop Mystery series. Delaney uses her contacts in Edinburgh and in Kansas to investigate the murder in this compelling cozy mystery. I liked this book a lot, feeling like I was there in Scotland. I especially loved the information about the Picts, and I was impressed at how Shelton folded the information into the story. Written in Stone was a fun read, with lots of interesting surprises and smart twists.
Egalleys for Written in Stone were provided by Minotaur Books through NetGalley, with many thanks, but the opinions are mine.