Alice Wendover

Bridie Quell spent twenty years correcting other people’s sentences. Then her aunt Vesta died and left her Marrow & Vine, a second-hand bookshop on the square of an English village she had never heard of. With it came thirty-one years of the shop’s buying ledgers, in whose margins Vesta wrote down exactly what she thought of everyone who came through the door.

Bridie has read every line. For stock, she says. Including the one about herself: Quell, B. — Oxford. Corrects other people’s letters for a living. Won’t want a shop. V.

Vesta was wrong about that.

Among the stock are fourteen books Vesta bought in March 1995 and never sold. Bridie has put them into the village auction, and in the catalogue, in her own hand, she expanded her aunt’s entry — Hearne, A. — to the only Hearne she knew: From the library of Ambrose Hearne, 1995.

On the night of the auction preview, a dealer who signed in as Ambrose Hearne is found dead on the stockroom floor beneath the gallery, the shop’s ladder across his back. The inspector says he fell. The pathologist says he was on the floor before the ladder came down. The village has already decided who did it — the dealer from out of town who has been telling the pub, loudly, where he was that night — and does not care to be asked again. Bridie, who believes only what is written down, is not so sure.

She does not go to doors. She reads paper. Callum, her seventeen-year-old Saturday boy, walks the village, reports back, and tells her when she is guessing (‘That’s not evidence. That’s a mood.’). Dawn, who runs the till and has no time for books, keeps the shop open and Bridie fed. And Bridie sits under her aunt’s lamp with the fire officer’s book, a builder’s written statement, thirty-one ledgers and a pencil, and crosses names off one at a time.

Seven names. Six of them went out of her door without anyone seeing them go. One of them may never have left.

And in the 1995 ledger, beside those fourteen books, her aunt has inked over the seller’s name so heavily that it came through the other side of the page.

Fair play, a very English village, a warm and dry sense of humour, and a cat that is not the shop’s. Everything Bridie has, you have. You may get there before she does. She would rather you didn’t.

A novel · paperback now · Kindle edition October 16, 2026

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Every Bonfire Night, Wychcombe wheels a stuffed guy down to the fire in the village Trust’s old hand-cart, and two hundred-odd people cheer when the sheet comes off.

This year the guy in the chair is Roland Askew, who chaired the Trust for fifteen years. He has not been stuffed.

Marrow & Vine is seeing the Trust’s centenary history through the press, and Bridie Quell has been proofing it batch by batch since September. So when Detective Sergeant Ankerdine lays a scrap torn from one of those proofs on the counter, a single line from the Trust’s old meeting minutes with Askew’s name struck out in a proofreader’s mark, the sergeant wants to know whose mark it is. She also wants Bridie to go on reading every piece of paper she brings.

Bridie says no. The Trust is her customer, and she has a shop to keep.

The village has its answer already: Warren Tull, who shouted at Askew in the Bell, the village pub, in October.

Callum, eighteen now and taking a year out, walks the lanes and brings back what he sees. Dawn keeps the till, keeps Bridie fed, and says what she thinks in as few words as will do it. Down the lane at the Grange, the care home where Bridie reads to eleven old people on Tuesday evenings, Edith Pendle has had a letter every week since April in the handwriting of her husband, who died in 2021. And somebody keeps seeing a light in a Grange window. Bridie does not believe in that sort of thing. She would still rather not walk past it after dark.

Then comes Remembrance Sunday, and a second scrap of the same line.

The torn line leads back to one Saturday afternoon in 1986, in the village hall, and to a minute book that says it was warmly received.

A Line Struck Through is the second Marrow & Vine Mystery, and a fine place to start: fair play, a very English November, a warm and dry sense of humour, a detective sergeant who will not take off her coat, and a cat that, whatever it thinks, is not the shop’s. Everything Bridie has, you have. You may get there before she does.

A novel · Kindle edition and paperback October 30, 2026

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