Book One of The Sudbury Murders
Richard “Dicky” Sudbury thought his days of telling stories were behind him. Once a modest crime novelist with nine books, he runs a dusty second-hand bookshop in the Cornish seaside village of St. Justan-by-Sea, far from the literary spotlight that never quite found him.
But when the village historian is discovered dead in the public library’s reading room, doors bolted and windows latched from within, Dicky recognises something chillingly familiar. The murder mirrors, down to the most minor details, the impossible locked-room mystery from his debut novel, The Locked Library.
With his sharp-tongued teenage shop assistant Nancy Lacey at his side and the sceptical DS Mark Penhaligon reluctantly accepting his help, Dicky is drawn into an investigation that forces him to confront the legacy he’d rather forget. As the village buzzes with whispers that his fiction has inspired real bloodshed, he must untangle a web of academic rivalry, forged documents, and a method lifted straight from his own imagination.
But someone in St. Justan-by-Sea knows his novels better than he’d like. And as Dicky peels back the layers of this meticulously staged crime, he begins to suspect that the truth behind the locked door is only the beginning of a much darker story—one that will bind him to murder for years to come.
Perfect for fans of Anthony Horowitz’s Magpie Murders and Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club, The Locked Library is an atmospheric Golden Age mystery with a modern twist, where books can be deadly and the past refuses to stay on the shelf.
“Turnover’s steady if you don’t count money.”
— Richard Sudbury, on running a bookshop in Cornwall