Elizabeth C. Main - Jane Serrano 01 - Murder of the Month Read Free Page A

open on this warm summer night, just in case. Unfortunately, business had fallen off at Thornton’s Books after the recent grand opening of the glossy Megabooks Plus! bookstore on Highway 97 north of town. Once the private residence of Marcus T. Konig, an early Juniper saloonkeeper, this house’s Victorian charm and central location on an oversized city lot had proved an ideal setting for the quiet business of selling books for the past ten years. With Juniper’s growth and booming economy, people were buying more books than ever, but our friendliness and personalized service couldn’t compete with the deep discounts offered by Megabooks Plus!—nor their animal-costumed sales staff flown in from Arizona one Saturday a month.
    If Laurence, a retired classics professor, had possessed even one shred of salesmanship, if he had ever looked up from his reading of The History of Herodotus long enough to notice the falling sales, maybe I wouldn’t have been foolish enough to propose that we host a mystery book club right at Thornton’s. But Laurence had been looking forlorn about his grandson’s sullen inability to find something to occupy him this summer, and Tyler had shown a slight interest in mysteries, so I had offered the brilliant suggestion that perhaps starting the club would serve the double purpose of giving Tyler something to do and spurring book sales.
    But anyone who would name his store simply “Thornton’s Books” and stock his shelves with Sophocles and Shakespeare instead of the latest celebrity tell-all fluff was definitely not a marketing whiz. While my own degree in English literature made me sympathetic to Laurence’s taste in reading, I assumed that Thornton’s could improve sales by stocking reading matter that was at least a few centuries more contemporary.
    And now he had the nerve to tell me to have a good meeting. I leaned against the ornate banister and shot him a baleful look. The false smile he wore made me sorry I wasn’t carrying something, preferably something hot and sticky, that I could drop on his head. The old rogue was trying to soothe me as though I were a nervous freshman faced with studying Thomas Aquinas for the first time.
    “ I can hardly wait. We always have such a jolly time.”
    He ignored my sarcasm. Approaching eighty years of age, his once tall frame was stooped and his hair had thinned, but Laurence Thornton still retained his professorial air of calm competence. “Tonight’s meeting will be fine. You’ll see.”
    “ Oh, yeah. I’ll see something all right, but … just listen to what’s going on upstairs!”
    “ Well, literary discussions do tend to get heated.”
    “ Literary? We’re not anywhere close to literary. Do you want to know why?” I descended a few steps. “Well, I’ll tell you.” I was more than happy to delay the trip upstairs. Besides, I’d been itching to tell Laurence a thing or two about what I’d been going though with this book club. “Let me give you a few pointers about how to set up a book club that might actually have a chance to achieve a literary discussion. Point one: Don’t let lunatics into your club. Point two: If they do slip in, don’t agree to a minimum three-month trial period because for some reason those lunatics will enjoy coming and won’t want to disband—”
    “ Even when—”
    “ Exactly! Even when it becomes clear that this group is absolutely impossible. I have no idea why. Ask the lunatics. Point three: Don’t let anyone in without making him swear in blood to read mysteries from a variety of categories—”
    “ But aren’t mysteries just … mysteries? With bodies and clues and such?”
    I ticked the categories off on my fingers. “Police procedural, hard-boiled detective, suspense, cozy—”
    “ Cozy?”
    “ A big category,” I said. “A peaceful little murder at the vicarage or some such nonsense that gives you a warm, fuzzy feeling when you read it. Anyway, wouldn’t you think that