Harrogate book seller invites customers to solve a ‘death’ in the shop as part of a series of new events

To coincide with all the excitement round the launch of this year's star-laden Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate next week, Imagined Things book shop located at 21 Montpellier Hill is keen to celebrate the event while entertaining its loyal customers.

The award-winning book shop’s popular owner Georgia Eckert said: "While we're not officially linked to the festival we have a lot of special events in the shop ready to take place round it.

"We always like to make the most of the festival atmosphere and authors in town and have plenty of things planned."

Events at Imagined Things include:

1 An Imagined Things panel of crime writers at Harrogate Library discussing their latest novels around the theme of Escapes & Expectations (ticketed event).

2 Early release books which aren't published until August.

3 Imagined Things Murder Mystery Trail to solve the murder of one of the shop's booksellers who's found 'dead' in the bookshop's basement (free to enter with a chance to win lots of prizes).

The premise of the shop’s murder mystery is simple but striking, says Georgia who launched her lovely bookshop in 2017 in a challenging environment for a small independent.

Can you imagine walking into the bookshop's basement only to find, to your horror, a DEAD bookseller?!

She's sprawled on the concrete with some mysterious objects around her - posioned.

That is the fate that awaits our bookshop next Thursday morning (yes we can tell the future!) and we need your help to solve Nina's murder.

Was the murderer Georgia, Debbie, Hayley or Sienna? And why?

As is that wasn’t enough going on at Imagined Things to mark Theakston Old Peculiar Crime Writing Festival, which runs from July 20-23 at the Old Swan Hotel, there’s a good chance of bumping into an author at the shop next week.

"We had over 42 authors in total who popped in to sign books last year,” said Georgia.