Lost Books and Old Bones

Delaney Nichols is enjoying drinks with a group of Edinburgh medical students who had come to the bookshop where she works to sell some antique medical texts. By the next morning, someone has tried to break into the Cracked Spine, and one of the students is found murdered in the alley. Delaney is sure the crime can be traced to the previous night's conversation about scalpels owned by a notorious 19th-century doctor who had bought corpses for dissection from murderers William Burke and William Hare. When she finds the scalpels in the bookshop's warehouse, she is determined to find the killer. Once again, as in Of Books and Bagpipes, Delaney is caught up in a mystery filled with Scottish history. The spirited unconventional amateur sleuth at times overshadows the other characters with her impulsiveness, rashness, and aggressiveness in inserting herself into the police investigation.