Publishers Weekly
01/30/2023
Brogan Roach and Laura Bunting—the narrators of Slater’s bleak debut—meet when the new manager of the failing London bookstore branch at which caustic Roach has long worked hires chipper Laura to boost sales. The women are like oil and water: Roach wears only black and is obsessed with true crime, while Laura sports colorful berets and thinks true crime is “tacky, exploitative crap.” But when Roach learns that Laura writes poetry about murder victims because her mother fell prey to a notorious serial killer, Roach starts stalking Laura, desperate to convince her they share a “dark connection.” The harder Roach tries, the more her misguided actions repulse and terrify Laura, locking the two in a dangerous downward spiral that threatens mutual destruction. Roach and Laura alternate chapters, their first-person-present accounts imparting tension and urgency. Both characters feel a bit cartoonish in their melodrama, but on balance, Slater delivers a twisty exploration of society’s fascination with the macabre. Fans of Simone St. James’s The Book of Cold Cases, take note. Agent: Caroline Eisenmann, Frances Goldin Literary. (Apr.)
Manila Bulletin
"We are given two anti-heroines, and it is a brilliant writing choice … Dark, brooding, and about establishing boundaries — or not!"
Chelsea G. Summers
"Alice Slater triumphs in Death of a Bookseller, the story of two frenemies who share an antagonistic obsession with true crime. I love a book that features messy women making very bad choices, and this novel delivers the delicious juice in a surprising, twisty narrative that has you guessing until its unpredictable end."
Guardian
"A spectacularly creepy debut ... Both bookselling and society's true crime are filleted mercilessly in a tense and disturbing read."
Julia Armfield
"Tense, addictive, and sticky underfoot."
Glamour
"You can't help but race through the pages. This will have huge commercial appeal."
Booklist
"Very dark, character-driven, slow-burn suspense … Slater explores the ethics surrounding our obsession with true crime and questions how we should handle other people's stories. This highly original, whip-smart first novel will have crime lovers second-guessing their next read."
Daily Mail
"The really terrific thing about the book is how the writer conjures that slightly mysterious quality that people working in bookshops always have."
Will Dean
"Utterly engrossing, atmospheric, and deliciously dark. Hugely compelling."
Catherine Ryan Howard
"Fresh and sharp, expertly plotted and also emotionally charged, comic but also pitch-black dark. . . . Utterly unforgettable."
Caitlin Barasch
"Written with dark wit and verve, this mischievous novel is clever, entertaining, and unsettling, with a gasp-inducing climax that beautifully (and wickedly) intertwines the two unforgettable anti-heroines. Each sentence is a dagger, sharpened to perfection; Slater's deliciously morbid debut will haunt you."
Chris Whitaker
"Fresh, funny, chilling and disturbing. The story crackles with killer prose and the characters slay you with their read-through-your-fingers desire and desperation. Searingly good."
Catriona Ward
"A dark masterpiece of grief and obsession. It will work its way under your skin like a splinter and stay there."
Caroline Kepnes
"Fresh, excellent, quotable, entertaining."
Kirkus Reviews
2023-02-08
Slater’s darkly comic debut follows the increasingly uneasy relations between two co-workers who have very different investments in true crime.
“I’ve always had a thing for death,” confesses Brogan Roach. Though she works at Spines Walthamstow, a failing branch of a bookstore with other locations around London, she finds her true vocation as a zealous reader, researcher, and follower of true-crime stories and podcasts, looking down her nose at self-avowed fans who flinch from the nasty details that are her meat and drink. When Laura Bunting arrives at the shop in connection with new manager Sharona’s attempt to raise it from the dying, Roach is first struck by Laura’s instant antipathy toward her, then transfixed by the poems Laura presents at a local reading, then increasingly entranced by this woman who makes it clear that she wants nothing to do with her. They must be sisters under the skin, Roach reasons, and in her own way she’s quite correct, for Laura’s connected to Roach’s passion in the worst way possible: Ten years ago, her mother became the final victim of the Stow Strangler. Police officer Lee Frost was convicted and imprisoned long ago for four of the Strangler’s five murders, but Laura continues to be as haunted by her death as Roach is by all those other deaths she can’t get enough of. Slater spins a compelling tale of Roach’s fatal fascination with Laura, but the tale unfolds with remarkably few twists, and the ones that come will surprise only newcomers to the genre. The highly ambivalent ending will please devotees of Schrödinger’s cat while leaving others out in the cold.
One modest bonus: You may never feel the same way about bookstores again.
