It’s the dawn of the 20th century and Lillian Delaney a young, unmarried woman, lives with her father, an aging and indebted bookseller, in Oxford, England. Lillian (aka Lily) is a proficient apprentice in the arcane business of bookbinding. She’s well-respected by her employer, John Caxton, but she’s leading a humdrum life with little social interaction.
That begins to change when she makes a professional visit to the home of a book-collecting doctor, W. Ashburn, who has received a partially burned book from a London seller, even though he never ordered it.
How and why the book, supposedly a novel from 1851 entitled A Song for a Knave, was damaged is a mystery to both the seller and the recipient. Ashburn has no use for the book and willingly gives it to Lily, who hopes to salvage it.
Only later does Lily discover a scrap of paper tucked into the book’s binding that reads “I wish you had not killed him.” Later still, Lily acquires additional volumes with more hidden pages written in the same style. They are letters, or fragments of letters, from a well-to-do woman to her lover, a penniless British gentleman whom she eventually marries in a clandestine wedding.
In one passage, the woman writes that her father is furious when he learns that she is pregnant. He verbally assaults her for ruining his chances of marrying her off to a wealthy nobleman. Was his degrading language and horrific tantrum prelude to something more sinister?
Markings in the books hint that there are six of them in all, but Lily only has three. From one of the concealed letters, Lily identifies the woman’s husband as a man named William Heathfield, but questions bloom like weeds as Lily’s obsession grows. Who wrote the letters? Did the woman’s enraged father physically attack her? And who murdered whom?
Lily’s search for answers is made all the more difficult because a knife-wielding thug working for someone else forces her to give him the books she has acquired (after she removed the hidden letters). He then demands that she find and relinquish the remaining books in the set, even though Lily has no idea where they are. Who does this guy work for? And why does his employer have such a keen interest in the books?
Compounding Lily’s problems, her personal life is a jumbled mess. Her ailing father, who is heavily in debt, is on the verge of selling his bookstore, which is located in the home he shares with Lily. She desperately hopes to prevent the sale by somehow finding enough money to placate her father’s creditors. At the same time, she’s trying to decide how to handle two would-be suitors: a man who works for a bookseller in London and a fellow from Oxford, whom she has known since childhood.
The plot twists in The Bookbinder’s Secret are too numerous to list here, and the author springs them on the reader at a dizzying clip. When someone breaks into Lily's home and assaults her father, sending him to the hospital, Lily becomes all the more determined to find the rest of the books.
It takes a while to tie up the loose ends, but all becomes clear in good time. The Bookbinder’s Secret is a novel for readers who enjoy a lively, clever yarn. It’s a complex tale suggesting that, while books often reveal marvels to those who read them, sometimes secrets remain just that -- secrets -- until a determined protagonist who is skilled at assembling books begins t0 dissect them. Very carefully, of course.
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