For me mystery novels are summer. They are captivating, enjoyable and the perfect thing to read on a vacation.

It was another ordinary day when I swung by the public library on my way to town. I picked out a couple of DVDs I needed — “Groundhog Day” and “Ghosts” — and then drifted along the “New Arrivals” bookshelves, browsing the authors and titles.

Red-necked phalarope, Bonaparte’s gull, band-rumped storm-petrel and harlequin duck. If you are thinking these don’t sound like names that should be included in a story about the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, you’re right.

In “A Fatal Booking” (Crooked Lane Books, 2022, 304 pages), Victoria Gilbert’s third novel in her series “Booklovers B&B Mysteries,” we again meet Charlotte Reed, owner of Chapters Bed-and-Breakfast in Beaufort, North Carolina. Charlotte is a former school teacher and 40-something widow who has inherited this inn from her great-aunt Isabella. With a passion for books and reading, Charlotte remodels the old mansion, turning it into a literary lovers paradise. 

Cypress, South Carolina is a moderately-sized town surrounded by farms where neighbors know one another and the pace of life is low-key.

But that is about to change. 

Although migrations have become a significant and controversial aspect of our current history, there is another annual migration that has been with us for centuries. That is the annual arrival of visitors to Appalachia that has become an honored tradition. It is customary for retired and/or wealthy families to make the annual trek to the Southern Highlands. The “summer home” visitors have reshaped the Appalachian economy and a large percentage of the native work force is now engaged in building, repairing and maintaining the homes of the summer folk. In fact, many of the men and women who once farmed this land are now the employees of the summer residents: wives become cooks and housekeepers and the men develop carpentry skills. They build sun decks, kilns and fireplaces and with luck, they become “almost” a part of the summer family.

For many people, summer means vacation, and vacation means beach. For readers, the beach in turn means packing books to be read for pleasure, books whose pages can absorb a bit of water or a splash of sun-tan lotion, page turners whose plots drive you through the story.