I liked Henry Sullivan, the main character in this book, and would love to meet him in real life and talk about books. I'd read McCaffrey's next book and the next just to spend more time with Henry. But I wanted to like the story more than I did. The plot kind of went this way and that way and was not nearly as interesting to me as the toss-away subplot of the letters and the secret room. I wish that had been the main story or that McCaffrey had saved it to use for a whole book. ( )

I liked Henry Sullivan, the main character in this book, and would love to meet him in real life and talk about books. I'd read McCaffrey's next book and the next just to spend more time with Henry. But I wanted to like the story more than I did. The plot kind of went this way and that way and was not nearly as interesting to me as the toss-away subplot of the letters and the secret room. I wish that had been the main story or that McCaffrey had saved it to use for a whole book. ( )

There is a great deal to like about this book, especially if you are a lover of books as Henry Sullivan most definitely is, he is after all a book buyer and seller. Set in Boston there is a lot of local atmosphere to this book, with the Beacon Hill houses to the Brookline part of town, you know that Boston is part of the story just because it is so much a part of Henry's life.

When an old friend/flame of Henry's is killed, just hours after he left her home and her bed, Henry is pulled into the mystery of who killed Morgan, and why? Morgan is the widow of a very popular publisher who has an amazing collection of books that Morgan is planning on donating to a college, all signed, all first editions, all authors that Heber Johnson published in his many, many years as a renowned publisher. So, who has motive? Henry because of his affair with Morgan? Arthur Johnson, the son of Morgan and Heber who is desperately in need of money and doesn't want the books donated but sold so he can have the money? Peter Johnson, the son of Heber's first wife and who has had almost no contact with his father over the years? Someone else that Henry doesn't yet know about?

All of the threads that Henry is following are interwoven in the mystery of a set of letters found in a small, walled off room, in a house that was going to be destroyed. Henry weaves a mystery out of the letters as well as trying to solve the mystery of the murder of Morgan.

Well written, lots and lots of literary allusions, and great characters. I will be reading the next in the series.
( )

For those who enjoy bibliomysteries -- that is, mysteries in which books feature prominently -- there are good options other than the books of John Dunning. One of these options is Vincent McCaffrey.

McCaffrey runs a Boston bookshop, and he recently turned to writing mysteries featuring Henry Sullivan, a bookhound like himself. The first two books in the series are "Hound" and "A Sleeping Hound to Wake," and he is reportedly working on a third.

In "Hound," Henry is asked by a former lover, an older woman named Morgan, to appraise the books left by her late husband, a literary agent. The books, many of them signed first editions, are worth a small fortune. Within a few days, Morgan has been strangled to death, and Henry becomes a suspect.

Without intending to play detective, Henry gets involved in the investigation when both Morgan's son and her stepson, plus a gay man who was devoted to her, come to him for information about the books. Is that why she was killed, and did one of these three men do it?

The murder mystery occupies only about half of "Hound." The rest of the novel is about Henry Sullivan himself, his relationships and his book business. All of this is fascinating. I look forward to finding his second novel. ( )

Any novel that features someone in the book business solving a mystery is likely to appeal to a biblioholic, and Hound is no exception. Vincent McCaffrey, the owner of Victor Hugo Books in Boston (formerly an excellent bricks-and-mortar bookshop that provided hours of browsing fun, now, alas, an internet-only business), uses his knowledge of the used book trade to great effect. Put this volume on the shelf alongside John Dunning’s Cliff Janeway series and Carolyn G. Hart’s Death on Demand books and create a biblio-heaven for the mystery buff.

Henry sells used books on the internet, but only to other dealers so as to avoid tax problems. He doesn’t make a lot of money, but he makes enough to be comfortable in his small apartment in one of Boston’s classier neighborhoods, in a house built while John Quincy Adams was president. Henry is single, but a few years ago he had an affair with Morgan Johnson, a woman then married to a man a good many years her elder, and in poor health. Morgan ultimately found that her conscience would not allow her to sustain the affair. Henry was heartbroken; even though Morgan was a number of years his senior, he loved her.

Heber Johnson, Morgan’s husband, spent his career as a literary agent for some of the most prominent American authors of the twentieth century. When Hound opens, Heber has recently died. Morgan resurfaces from the past to ask Henry to value the most personal portion of Heber’s library: those books that were inscribed to him by his clients. It’s an amazing collection, as McCaffrey describes it. Anyone with his or her own collection of twentieth century first editions is likely to salivate at the description, despite McCaffrey’s inclusion of a couple of fictional authors.

The appointment for the appraisal of the books turns physical, as Morgan and Henry pay a brief, tender visit to their past together. That is why it is all the more gut-wrenching when the police show up at Henry’s door the next day and drag him in for questioning regarding Morgan’s murder. Henry is not content to leave finding the perpetrator to the police, and he follows the clues left in the Johnsons’ library to attempt to discover the truth on his own.

Even while he is working to solve this mystery, Henry is also preoccupied by a mystery from the past. His friend, Albert, runs a salvage operation often called into a home after the death of the owners to clear it out and prepare it for sale. One home yields a cache of bestsellers from the earliest years of the twentieth century, all in near mint condition. Along with the books is a pile of letters written by a young woman who, uncharacteristically for the time, explored Europe on her own while in her 20s. Henry tries to find out what happened to her, and how and why her library came to be walled up in an old house.

Much of Hound turns on the hazard of the estate tax (otherwise known as the inheritance tax), which I found puzzling. In 2009, when this book was copyrighted, the first $3.5 million of any estate was exempt from federal taxation, and the first $1 million exempt from taxation by the State of Massachusetts. Although Heber’s children are in somewhat desperate need of money, it seems unlikely that $1 million wouldn’t cover their problems. And the estate, though clearly sizable, doesn’t seem likely to exceed $3.5 million in value. But perhaps this is a problem only for bookworms who are also lawyers, and won’t give pause to any other reader.

The book lore contained in this novel is great fun. I happened to read it just a day or two before attending the Sacramento Book Fair, and was pleased to come across a number of first editions by Earl Stanley Gardner, just as described in Hound. I enjoyed the discussion of such things as the relative merits of authors like John Updike and Tom Wolfe and the diminishment of the once-proud literary establishment into a business so strongly tied to the profits made in the current quarter that good authors aren’t given the time to build an audience. For me, this type of detail was the best reason to read the book; the mystery was nice, but secondary.

This quiet book isn’t for those who want a thrill on every page. Nor is it for the reader of classic mysteries who want a scrupulously fair mystery that allows him or her to solve the puzzle before the author reveals the identity of the culprit. But for those of us who love books about books, this is a vital addition to our personal libraries. ( )