The Haunted Bookshop
Aubrey Gilbert walks into Roger Mifflin's Brooklyn bookshop hoping to land an advertising account. He leaves with neither a contract nor his assumptions about what books mean. Mifflin prescribes novels to customers like medicine, insisting that good literature advertises itself. Aubrey keeps returning, first for Titania Chapman, the shop's new apprentice, then for something he can't name: the strange, sacred atmosphere of a place where books choose their readers. Then the city intrudes. He's attacked on a dark street. A rare volume vanishes from the shelves. Two figures shadow the alley behind Parnassus at Home. Aubrey suspects the charismatic Mifflin of plotting something sinister, but the truth he uncovers is stranger and more tender than kidnapping. Part love letter to bookshop culture, part genuine suspense novel, The Haunted Bookshop invented a genre: the bibliomystery. It endures for anyone who has ever felt that entering the right bookstore felt like coming home.
