Books Of A Feather (Bibliophile Mystery, #10)

by Kate Carlisle

"San Francisco book-restoration expert Brooklyn Wainwright's latest project is for the birds, but it may have her running for her life. Brooklyn's friend Ian runs the Covington Library, which is hosting an exhibit featuring John James Audubon's massive masterpiece, Birds of America, currently on loan from an Arab sheik. During the gala celebrating the book, she is approached by Jared Mulrooney, the president of the National Birdwatchers Society, who urgently needs Brooklyn's skilled hands to repair a less high-profile book of Audubon drawings that's fallen victim to spilled wine. At the same party, Brooklyn is flying high after she's asked to refurbish and appraise a rare copy of Poor Richard's Almanac. But everything runs afoul later that evening when Mulrooney's body is discovered in the library."--

• ISBN13: 9780451477705
• Publish Date: 7 June 2016
• Publish Status: Remaindered
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Penguin Putnam Inc
• Imprint: New American Library
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 320
• Language: English

Reviews

[MurderByDeath]

One of the pitfalls of writing a series, I'd imagine, is trying to make each book in the series stand alone, while giving the new reader enough information to figure out the continuing character development.

The Bibliophile series is typically one of my favourites; I could read about Brooklyn's book restorations all day, but Birds of a Featherstruggled under the weight of 9 books worth of character development.  Carlisle tried to stitch it in and avoided info dumping, but for someone who has been on board since book one, the feeling of repetition was unavoidable.  Add to this what felt like an enormous amount of summarisation of clues and suspects - sometimes it seemed we were 'reviewing the case' every 10 pages or so - and this tenth book ended up not feeling as strong as previous efforts.

But boy did I love the book stuff.  The plot of this one centers around Audubon's Birds of America and the author had me running to the google for more information about double-elephants and auction prices and bindings.  If you like birds and you ever have the chance to see a first folio edition of The Birds of America it sounds like it's well worth thee effort.

The mystery was... pretty good.  I never figured out who did it, but I wasn't surprised.

I'm still huge fan and look forward to #11.

[Silvara]

Check out my other reviews, discussions and link ups at Fantasy of the Silver Dragon.

I received this book for free from Obsidian in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

I didn't know anything about book binding before I read the last book in this series. I still don't really! But it was really interesting to read the little bits of info that Brooklyn thinks about when restoring old books. Reading this one in hardback, meant that I was able to see what she was talking about when she mentioned things like "end papers" and "headband". I could still visualize it if it had been paperback, but it was easier (and far neater!) to actually SEE it.

Most of the books Brooklyn was given for restoration were about birds, or had a bird name in the title. There were a few exceptions, and the book that Inspector Lee gives Brooklyn to fix for her was really neat-sounding. I liked how they finally seem to have started a friendship, and I hope it sticks around in the next books.

My first idea about who the killer was, was completely wrong. And my 2nd suspect was only partially right. I also liked the side mysteries. Though I'm totally expecting to have Micah pop up in a later book, since that thread wasn't wrapped up.

This was a very quick read, even at over 300 pages. I didn't want to put it down until I had finished, there were no slow spots, but at the same time, it was never so fast paced that you weren't able to follow what was going on. I can hardly wait to see what happens in the next book. If you haven't started reading this series yet, you need to!

This review was originally posted on Fantasy of the Silver Dragon