Fatal Shadows by Josh Lanyon

  Pasadena bookseller Adrien English has a problem. His high school friend and current employee has been brutally murdered. Someone has ransacked his shop and is sending him threatening messages. The police seem to consider Adrien a suspect in the case of the former, and are dismissive of the latter. And then there is the matter of his heart - sudden excitements tend to send poor Adrien's heart into a tizzy.

This was a lovely little mystery. Little because it is less than two hundred pages. Lovely because Adrien is adorable. He is what I like to call an accidental detective. He runs a bookshop and is working on publishing his first book. It is mystery of course. Notwithstanding his love of  mysteries Adrien doesn't have any particular interest in being involved in an actual mystery. Nevertheless Adrien must become a detective if only to save himself. When his friend Robert is killed, the police seem ready to arrest Adrien, thinking perhaps it was some sort of lover's quarrel gone terribly wrong. Adrien thinks this might be a hate crime, perhaps a serial killer who's stalking and killing gay men. Whoever the culprit is, Adrien has to figure it out before he ends up in jail or dead himself.
 
Fatal Shadows wasn't a perfect mystery. There were a few holes and I figured out the culprit pretty easily. I was expecting a bit more romance. On Goodreads this was tagged as both a romance and a mystery. The romance was pretty scant here. This being said, this is the first in a series. Hopefully the romance that is hinted at in Fatal Shadows takes shapes in the next book.