Rare book seller Ashlyn Greer has a unique gift: when she picks up a book, she senses the echoes of its previous owners’ emotions. When two custom-bound volumes come into her possession, she begins a bit of detective work to discover who wrote them. There is no author named, no copyright page, no hints of who/when/where/why/how they were published. As she reads the two novels, she realizes that one is written by Hemi, a poor newspaper reporter, and the other by Belle, a wealthy socialite, each telling their version of their tragic love affair. Her research begins with the man who brought the books into her life: a college professor cleaning out after his father’s death.
The characters are well written and, especially Belle, undergo a nice character arc. The book is told in chapters switching between Ashlyn’s point of view interspersed with chapters from each of the two books. In The Echo of Old Books, author Davis deftly blends two time frames, the 1940s of the two books, with the 1980s of Ashlyn; two romances (Hemi and Belle’s and Ashlyn and the professor’s while slowly divulging why one was tragic and why the other two are so wounded by their pasts they can’t seem to move on. It was particularly nice to find two women who achieve success without a man in their lives. I admit I sniffled a bit at the end.
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The Echo of Old Books (Lake Union Publishing, March 28, 2023) is available through:
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