Summer Merriweather’s career as a Shakespeare professor hangs by a bookbinder’s thread, so she spends her summer in England, researching a scholarly paper that, with any luck, will save her job. Her English idyll ends when her mother, Hildy, shuffles off her mortal coil from an apparent heart attack. Returning to Brigid’s Island, North Carolina, for the funeral, Summer is impatient to settle the estate, sell Beach Reads—her mom’s embarrassingly romance-themed bookstore—and go home. As she drops by Beach Reads, Summer finds threatening notes addressed to Hildy: “Sell the bookstore or die.” Clearly, something is rotten on Brigid’s Island. What method is behind the madness? Was Hildy murdered? The police insist there’s not enough evidence to launch a murder investigation. Instead, Summer and her Aunt Agatha screw their courage to the sticking place and start sleuthing. There are more suspects on Brigid’s Island than are dreamt of in the Bard’s darkest philosophizing, and if Summer can’t find the villain, the town will be littered with a Shakespearean tragedy’s worth of corpses—including her own.
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