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.