Hosting a Book Club at The Secondhand Bookworm

Book 7 in The Secondhand Bookworm series of novels is NOW available worldwide in paperback, kindle and FREE with Kindle Unlimited from Amazon.

Our delightful protagonist Nora Jolly is hosting a Book Club over six weeks in the front room of The Secondhand Bookworm, a winding three story shop filled to the brim with thousands upon thousands of used and antiquarian books. Eleven people have signed up for the club, including five of Nora’s work colleagues - the grim and frowning Roger, the exuberant newly employed Amy, the sarcastic older Betty (who’s on the lookout for romance), the bemused and eager Felix, and Nora’s sister-in-law Cara (who has hurt her back lifting books and is on a strict regime of the most bizarre stretches). 

There are also three of The Secondhand Bookworm’s most eccentric customers - Spencer Brown, who avidly collects occult books and resides in a Gothic house with a tower at the top of the hill, Crossword-Lady, with her outrageous culinary skills, her obsession with donkeys and who has designated herself as Nora’s literary crossword partner, and steely-eyed Miss Raven, who only buys and reads children’s books but has decided to give Nora’s mystery series a try.

The last three members include handsome James, the Duke of Cole, who resides in his newly renovated castle that gave Castletown its name, Humphrey Pickering, whose sister Georgina Pickering owns the two branches of The Secondhand Bookworm, one in Castletown and the other in Seatown, and finally, Danny, a stranger, who is new to Castletown and looking for companionship (much to Betty’s delight).

This time the story takes place over seven weeks as Nora and the members of The Book Club at The Secondhand Bookworm embark upon a journey into the mind of a forgotten author and his priest sleuth protagonist, Father Ulysses E. Flood, set in the tiny parish of Saint Aldhelm’s, located just outside Castletown.

Alongside the hilarious meetings, Nora endures the usual bookshop madness in the lead up to the book club gatherings, which take place in the front room of The Secondhand Bookworm after hours, Over the weeks, Nora works with a young Hugh Grant look-a-like (whose vanity has gone to his head), discovers a priest hole, turns away a gunslinger, wards off a hawker selling hideous Christmas-themed leggings and takes the book club to the Duke’s castle when the owner of the antique shop next door cuts through the electric mains in The Secondhand Bookworm.

Alongside, Nora reluctantly samples Crossword Lady’s outrageous food offerings, encounters White-Lightning Joe (a former book thief), brings down a curse when an unhinged Mrs Raven joins one of the meetings with her daughter and there are ‘Thirteen at Dinner’, chases a rogue fieldfare out of the top room, counsels Betty over the Shark Song and spends the New Year on the borders of Scotland at the Duke’s manor house. And finally, Nora keeps Felix and Georgina apart when Felix grandly quits working at The Secondhand Bookworm; assures Spencer that James, Duke of Cole, is not a vampire; spends a crazy day on calls with Georgina that includes attempting to buy books from an ancient old woman in bed who looks like the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood; braves a garage full of spindly spiders and a pile of books dumped in the middle of the floor, all the while running a bookshop with bizarre customers, endless books and the usual outrageous situations.

It’s another delightful adventure at the county of Cole’s most eccentric bookshop in book seven of The Secondhand Bookworm series of novels.

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