Elementary, She Read: A Sherlock Holmes Bookshop Mystery

This charming series launch from Delaney (Unreasonable Doubt) will please Sherlock Holmes and cozy fans. British expat Gemma Doyle runs the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop and Emporium, a business started by her great-uncle Arthur (who claims to be a distant cousin of Conan Doyle), in the Cape Cod town of West London. Gemma finds herself in the middle of a real-life whodunit after a woman abandons what appears to be an original 1887 Beeton’s Christmas Annual in the store. A copy of this rare magazine, in which the first Holmes story, the novel A Study in Scarlet, appeared, is worth a fortune. Along with her close friend Jayne Wilson, Gemma traces the woman to her hotel room, only to find her strangled corpse. This grim discovery doesn’t stop Gemma from investigating further. She identifies the dead woman as Mary Ellen Longton, who turns out to have been the nurse to a recently deceased millionaire recluse, who named her in his will. Romantic entanglements and another murder victim thicken the plot, which builds to a fairly clued reveal. Agent: Kim Lionetti, BookEnds Literary Agency. (Mar.)