British cozy mysteries from a Bloomsbury bookshop, where the cat has opinions and the late owner refuses to leave.
Get the free book Get in touchImogen Penrose lives in Bloomsbury with a tabby cat called Boswell and a great many books. She writes the Bloomsbury Bookshop Mysteries, which follow Cleo Marchmont, an amateur sleuth who inherits her great-aunt's bookshop and discovers it comes with rather more than first editions.
She is at her happiest in second-hand bookshops, at her most reliable on her morning walk through Bedford Square, and at her least useful before the second cup of tea.
A week in a Sussex village. A cottage to clear, a great-aunt to lay to rest, and a letter on the kitchen table that names three people owed an explanation. Cleo Marchmont thinks she has come to say goodbye. She has come to start something instead.
The First Edition is the free prequel to the Bloomsbury Bookshop Mysteries. Download it in any format and meet Cleo before the first body turns up.
Read it free on BookFunnelCleo Marchmont has come home to Bloomsbury to take over her great-aunt's struggling bookshop. The shop comes with three complications: a tabby cat with opinions, the ghost of her great-aunt who refuses to leave the premises, and a body in the Russian literature section. With her aunt as a spectral consultant and a cat who recognises liars on sight, Cleo has to solve a murder before the killer decides she has read too much already.
For fans of Lucy Connelly, Verity Bright, and Jackie Baldwin.
The bookshop comes with a cat. The stairs come with a ghost. And the Russian literature, this morning, comes with a body.
Cleo Marchmont came home to Bloomsbury for a quiet bookshop and a quieter life. She did not expect the cat and the ghost that came with it. She really did not expect the dead collector among the Dostoevsky on the morning she meant to reopen.
The police call it a sad accident. Cleo, who spent eleven years telling true first editions from clever fakes, does not.
The book by the body is a forgery. The cellar is full of stock that was never her aunt's. Her shut shop has been a warehouse for eighteen months. That leaves no shortage of suspects, and the quiet man at the centre of it has been nothing but kind to her.
A careful man does not leave a loose end on the shelf.
Out now on Kindle, free to read in Kindle Unlimited, and in paperback.
Cleo Marchmont has nearly got used to the ghost. She has almost made peace with the cat. She was not prepared for the body in the wing-back chair.
Hester Lockwood ran the book club the way she ran her literary agency: by knowing everyone's secrets. She dies after the September meeting. The doctor says her heart. The relief in the room is general.
Cleo says nothing. She is looking at the book in the dead woman's lap. No bookplate. Wrong edition. Not the copy Hester came in with.
A celebrated scholar. A novelist she dropped. A dealer who would rather not discuss provenance. One of them took what Hester had tucked inside that book.
The file is closed. The suspects are grieving beautifully. The next book club is in three weeks.
A tidy verdict is a very good place to hide.
Out now on Kindle, free to read in Kindle Unlimited, and in paperback.
The cat has forgiven the radiator. The ghost has gone quiet, which she never does. And a foreman's torch has found a man folded against a cellar wall, behind an iron door that was on no plan.
He was twenty-six, and cataloguing the Ansell papers, in 1973. The family said he had gone to America.
Crispin Fell reads houses for television. He has found the one that will make his name, and he means to have it alone. Nine days after the door comes down he is dead beneath it.
Cleo Marchmont sells second-hand books in Bloomsbury. She reads provenance for a living. No purchase. No bequest. No accession.
A granddaughter with a sale to close. A producer written out of the film that was to make him. A cousin who keeps the flame, and the run of the place. One of them can describe the inside of that room.
A house can hold its breath a long time.
Preorder now, out 1 October 2026, and free to read in Kindle Unlimited.
The cat will not get off the card index. The ghost has opinions about the window. And the body is on a library floor, under a marble bust that did not fall on its own.
Professor Ambrose Sharpe saw the Charleston letters in 1978, for one afternoon. So he always said. He wrote four hundred pages about them.
No photograph. No footnote. No second reader. He is killed three days before he stands up to quote them.
Cleo Marchmont sells second-hand books in Bloomsbury. She counts things. Not one page says what the paper looked like.
A publisher with ninety-one thousand pounds in the ground. A scholar asking the same question since 1987. An editor who sat opposite him twice a week for twenty years and says he was told nothing. One of them already knew what he was going to say.
The safest lie is the one nobody ever had to prove.
Preorder now, out 1 November 2026, and free to read in Kindle Unlimited.
The cat has the day-book. The ghost keeps to the philosophy shelves. The body came out from under a Christmas tree twenty-five years ago, round the corner.
A boy of twenty-two carries a box into a Bloomsbury bookshop and asks Cleo Marchmont how big a mistake he has made. He has bought a retiring dealer's back room with everything he ever saved.
Eleven books, each priced in pencil. Eleven prices rubbed out. Nothing written back in. At the bottom, in holly paper, is a Christmas Carol of 1843, never opened.
Desmond Tunstall gave one book away each Christmas and chose the person it would wound. The inquest said his own lights killed him.
A collector who wanted it all her life. A woman the trade decided was a thief. A young man at the coats nobody could describe.
Nobody keeps a book that long for the pleasure of owning it.
A Christmas novella, and a fine place to start the series. Preorder now, out 24 November 2026, and free to read in Kindle Unlimited.
For review copies, events, or simply to tell me which corner of your local bookshop you like best. I read every message.