Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Quiet Neighbors: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Quiet Neighbors: A Novel
    Unavailable
    Quiet Neighbors: A Novel
    Ebook367 pages6 hours

    Quiet Neighbors: A Novel

    By Catriona McPherson

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A woman on the run blows the dust off a series of deadly secrets 

    It’s the oldest bookshop in a town full of bookshops; rambling and disordered, full of treasures if you look hard. Jude found one of the treasures when she visited last summer, the high point of a miserable vacation. Now, in the depths of winter, when she has to run away, Lowell’s chaotic bookshop in that backwater of a town is the safe place she runs to. 

    Jude needs a bolt-hole; Lowell needs an assistant, and when an affordable rental is thrown in too, life begins to look up. The gravedigger’s cottage isn’t perfect for a woman alone, but at least she has quiet neighbors. 

    Quiet, but not silent. The long dead and the books they left behind both have tales to tell, and the dusty rooms of the bookshop are not the haven they seem to be. Lowell’s past and Jude’s present are a dangerous cocktail of secrets and lies, and someone is coming to light the taper that could destroy everything.

    Praise:

    A 2016 Agatha Award Finalist for Best Contemporary Novel

    A 2017 Mary Higgins Clark Award Finalist

    A 2017 IPPY Award Bronze Medalist for Mystery/Cozy/Noir

    "Quiet Neighbors drew me in from the very first page, and I stayed up late reading it because I couldn't wait to find out what happened next. That's the definition of a good book."—Charlaine Harris, #1 New York Times bestselling author

    "McPherson writes mystery stories that are both cozy and creepy, which accounts for the quirky charm of Quiet Neighbors."—The New York Times

    "Outstanding."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

    "Layer upon layer of deception."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

    "McPherson is a master of slightly creepy narratives that are complex and character driven."—Library Journal (starred review)

    "Quiet Neighbors is a real find . . . This is one of those ideal stories that you cannot put down and actually feel sad when it's over."—Suspense Magazine

    "Quiet Neighbors is a cleverly conceived, skillfully executed, decidedly nontraditional small-town mystery that is bursting at the seams with warmth, wit, moxie, and menace."—Mystery Scene

    “Despite the dark underpinnings, this is also a story of love, family, trust, and forgiveness.”—Booklist

    "Intricately layered and psychologically taut."—The Strand Magazine

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherLlewellyn Worldwide
    Release dateApr 8, 2016
    ISBN9780738747811
    Unavailable
    Quiet Neighbors: A Novel
    Author

    Catriona McPherson

    Born and raised in Edinburgh, Catriona McPherson left Edinburgh University with a PhD in Linguistics and worked in academia, as well as banking and public libraries, before taking up full-time writing in 2001. For the last ten years she has lived in Northern California with a black cat and a scientist. In 2020 she has been shortlisted for a third Mary Higgins Clark Award, for Strangers at the Gate, and won a Left Coast Crime 2020 Lefty Award for the Best Humorous Mystery for Scot and Soda.

    Read more from Catriona Mc Pherson

    Related to Quiet Neighbors

    Related ebooks

    Mystery For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Spellcheck

      Jan 1, 2019

      Whose history I do not know. I do know I’ve been e-upbraided for my fast and loose spelling of Woden, the god whose last worshipper must have slipped under the sod during the medieval period, somewhere in the 10th century—imagine those bog-soaked des

      5 min read

    • Article

      The Reader

      May 1, 2020

      The Reader
      5 min read

    • Article

      A Space for Bette Howland

      May 6, 2019

      A Space for Bette Howland
      7 min read

    • Article

      10 Iconic Brooklyn Books…

      Jan 17, 2018

      10 Iconic Brooklyn Books…
      8 min read

    • Article

      Books Out of Place

      Oct 31, 2017

      I take it upon myself to pluck used books off a stranger’s stoop or from a trash can lid. This is how they sneak into my life, crawling with traces of the people who held them in the past, who touched them, who were touched by them. Strangers, like g

      7 min read

    • Article

      All My Tomorrows

      May 10, 2022

      It was Misha’s first day minding the shop, and already she’d broken the fifth rule. Always lock the door immediately. When you had the most valuable merchandise in the universe, you had to take the utmost precautions. She hadn’t meant to disobey. It

      13 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Sep 1, 2022

      1. Here there’s no rainy season.Sun scalds my forehead,yet the pool is empty. Beside it,a toppled table, its glass surface shattered.The asphalt is too hot for bare feet. 2. Far away: white hillocksand white dunes under a deepblue sky. Swirling winds

      5 min read

    • Article

      New Zealand Books

      Jul 14, 2019

      It’s astonishing to realise on finishing this book that Marilyn Waring had been in Parliament for nine years when she retired at the age of 32. And that she developed and maintained a powerful influence on national politics in that time – and afterwa

      4 min read

    • Article

      Paper Love

      Jun 17, 2022

      Paper Love
      9 min read

    • Article

      Literary Paper Dolls: Franny

      May 20, 2019

      Literary Paper Dolls: Franny
      5 min read

    • Article

      Shelf Life

      Aug 4, 2022

      Shelf Life
      5 min read

    • Article

      Liminal Spaces

      Nov 2, 2020

      Liminal Spaces
      11 min read

    • Article

      Apparition

      Mar 26, 2020

      Apparition
      8 min read

    • Article

      Sam Delaney Is At Home

      Oct 24, 2022

      I received an unsolicited package in the mail. It was a padded envelope, pretty crumpled, my name and address scrawled in Sharpie. Maybe I’ve watched too many police procedurals, but I immediately analysed the handwriting as being that of a psychopat

      2 min read

    • Article

      Ghost Girl, Banana

      Aug 21, 2023

      By the time I was 25, there were only two things I remembered about Mumma. The first was that she smelled of watermelons, the second was that we were happy. We’d taken our father’s name of course, but a name is only half a story. The other half exist

      6 min read

    Reviews for Quiet Neighbors

    3.5/5

    82 ratings11 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 4/5
      Well spun mystery and the ending left me with a bit of a chill.
    • 1/5
      I really wanted to like this book, and I did finish it. The ending though -- the mysteries were too obvious and the relationship at the end -- what the heck? Disappointed, and not sure if I'll read the others from McPherson I have on my 'TBR' list.
    • 4/5
      Quiet Neighbors begins with a girl on a train, from London to Scotland, obviously running from something/someone. She ends up in Wigtown, Scotland, where she once vacationed. This woman, Jude, is befriended and given a job and a place to live by a used bookstore owner. As the book develops, we slowly are given clues to Jude's past, as well as Lowell's, the shop owner. Wigtown is very small and new people are noticed. Shortly after Jude arrives, a young women (Eddy) arrives and claims that Lowell is her father. He accepts Jude as she is, he accepts Eddy as well. It turns out, they all have secrets in their past, as do other townspeople. Quiet Neighbors is the unfolding of all their stories. It's not a romance, yet it's a love story. It's not a comedic book, yet it's very amusing and wry. It's not gory, yet it's a murder mystery. In spite of the number of characters (3 main but many more on the periphery), McPherson relates a tale I could not put down. She fleshed out the characters in such a masterful way and created such an improbable cast of characters that I found myself rooting for a happy ending. I was not disappointed. A jolly good read.
    • 5/5
      The cover of the book was deceptive---it wasn't nearly so scary as that but the mystery was certainly cleverly evolved and I enjoyed being puzzled right up until the very end! Great story.
    • 4/5
      The first few pages got me hooked, and I couldn't put the book down. When June flees from her life and a secret in London, she finds rescue and a friendly face in a small bookshop. Soon, she's in over her head sorting out the mess of books filling up the store, an easy task for a professional librarian. But while doing so, she stumbles about several volumes carrying diary-like notes in them. When she moves to a little cottage which she soon learns belonged to the man who owned those books, she starts investigating what mystery he kept hidden in his cryptic entries. When a young pregnant woman shows up in the shop some day, claiming to be Lowell's (the store owner) daughter, things become even more complicated.I loved the beginning - the description of the messy bookshop, June's and Lowell's shared passion for books - it was the perfect setting for a great story to unfold. When Eddy showed up, the story took a turn and suddenly, there were three mysteries to solve - what happened to June in London, what is Eddy's story and what happened in the past to make the town people so nervous?While I doubted Eddy's true motives for a long while (just as June did) and found her character less intriguing than June or Lowell, at the end everything made sense, and the solution was not one I would have guessed too easily. This unexpected, wonderfully twisted and almost, but not too cozy mystery taking place in and around a bookshop made a perfect read.(I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review)
    • 4/5
      3.5 The dark atmosphere usually present in McPherson's stand alones is missing from this one. Yet, Quiet Neighbors has its own attractions. A musty old bookstore called Lowland Glen, some awesome characters, a now dead old man who wrote secrets in the books he read for a bookclub, and secrets, plenty of secrets. All the characters have one but only one has a secret that was deadly.Enjoyed this one, it was fun. All the books, seeing how it all plays out, sometimes funny, like a comedy of errors. One secret is unraveled which leads to another being presented. Such a good writer, seem to like whatever she writes, but the characters and the setting definitely made this one special. So not dark, nor really insidiously evil, though there was evil done in the past, just a different type of mystery. Guess the dead do talk.ARC from Netgalley.
    • 4/5
      Good Story! wrapped up nicely! love the descriptions of finding a loved book or author!
    • 1/5
      quite boring, I kept hanging on hoping it would pick up. don't bother
    • 4/5
      Charming, especially in its efforts to be dark... Love the parallel mystery-solving.
    • 3/5
      Jude is on the run, but from what? She expects the police to be pursuing her, but we do not learn why until near the end. She returns to a town in which she had visited a used bookstore and is befriended by the owner. A young, pregnant woman shows up claiming to be the store owner's daughter, of whose existence he had been unaware. While sorting books Jude notices brief notes in the flyleaves of certain books which turn out to have belonged to the deceased resident of the cottage in which she is living. When she mentions some of the names of people named strange things start to happen. Mystery piles upon mystery until all is suddenly unraveled. Interesting but frustrating at times.
    • 2/5
      Book source ~ NetGalleyJude runs away from London when something bad happens. She was going to fly somewhere far away, but when she gets to the train station on her way out of town, she remembers this old whacky bookshop she visited in this tiny out of the way town and decides to run there instead. What she finds is more than she bargained for and she has to figure out this dinky town’s secrets as well as solve another mystery about her employer, all while staying off the grid and away from the authorities.There are three mysteries going on in this story and they are all fascinating. Unfortunately, they are the only thing that kept me going. I had to know the answers. If this is the writing style of this author then I will not be reading any more. I hate the style. It’s slapdash and sloppy. There are a million “oh dears” and “my, my my” and other such exclamations. The conversations are really hard to follow with all the local slang and such. Quite tedious and supremely irritating. The writing style does not make it any easier. I only give this a rating of two for the mysteries which are eventually spelled out in a somewhat coherent way. Otherwise, blerg.