Note: Thank you to NetGalley, Storm Publishing, and author Ellie Alexander for the advanced reader copy of this book. This review will also be posted on NetGalley. What follows is my unbiased review of the book.

When reading books in a series, unless you’re committed to reading each book in order, you run the risk of missing out on something important. That might be the case with A Body at the Book Fair. I’ve read a few of the books in author Ellie Alexander’s Secret Bookcase Mystery series, but not all of them. I think that made it hard to connect to part of the story. I have read the third and fourth books in the series, but there’s no recap here that details how the ongoing mystery was figured out.

Annie Murray is now the part-owner of The Secret Bookcase, a bookstore in Redwood Grove, California. Along with her business partner, Fletcher, they are attempting to balance the bookstore with a detective agency. Annie’s background is in criminology, which she turned away from after the murder of her best friend, Scarlet. That unsolved murder has haunted Annie, and at the beginning of A Body at the Book Fair, she’s determined to confront the person who killed Scarlet once and for all.

Fletcher and Annie travel to Silicon Valley for a booksellers’ convention. This puts them in close proximity to the company Scarlet was investigating when she was murdered. Annie has a plan. Before they can go forward with it, there’s a murder at the convention. A tech-guru who promised a virtual reality headset that would allow people to experience books in a different way is killed when the prototype headset malfunctions during his presentation.

Now Fletcher and Annie are involved in not just one but two murder investigations. Although the police are there, they don’t seem to get information from suspects the way Annie and Fletcher do. Perhaps people let their guard down at the convention because they see the two of them as one of them, but I felt like the situation was forced. I can’t imagine any police department deferring to a couple of private investigators during a murder investigation. There are numerous suspects with motives, as the victim was more of a con artist than anything else.

The story overall felt forced to me. In a way, I’m glad this book wraps up the mystery about Scarlet, because I think Alexander wrote her way into a corner a bit with that. The investigation feels like an episode of Scooby-Doo where the guilty party confesses all when they should keep their mouth shut. I kept expecting to hear “And I would have gotten away with it if it weren’t for you meddling kids!” Solving the murder at the book convention ends much the same way. It doesn’t have a realistic feel to it at all. Still, it was fun to guess who the guilty party was. I just think the story should have focused on one murder or the other, rather than having them solve two murders that the police couldn’t.

The characters didn’t have a lot of depth for me, either. It seemed like there was a lot of repetition in describing them and in what is going on in their heads. How many times do we have to hear about the fact that Annie is attempting something dangerous? I would say it was brought up on nearly every page. The thing is, it didn’t have to be. It also felt a little too convenient that Annie knows where the evidence is. I mean, if her friend uncovered evidence that resulted in her murder, why would she hide it inside the building the guilty party owns? I just had a really hard time believing these events would happen as they did.

A Body at the Book Fair is the sixth book in this series, and the end of the series as well. Ellie Alexander intends to start a new series with Annie and Fletcher as the Novel Detective Agency. I don’t know that it will be a must-read for me. If you’d like a light read that really doesn’t take a lot of work, this series could be for you. It’s not a bad mystery, but I tend to like the grittier, more realistic mysteries than stories like this.