News & Features » December 2013 » Indie Bookstore Spotlight: Seattle Mystery Bookshop

Indie Bookstore Spotlight: Seattle Mystery Bookshop

Welcome to Akashic in Good Company, a feature highlighting some of the amazingly talented, hard-working, committed people Akashic has had the pleasure of working with over the past fifteen years. Today, we are delighted to feature a virtual tour of our criminally good friends located on the West Coast: Seattle Mystery Bookshop!

Seattle Mystery Bookshop started with a simple conversation between Bill Farley (then a bookseller at Whodunit? in Philly) and author Aaron Elkins, who believed that Seattle needed its own mystery bookshop. Taking the idea to heart, Bill went home that night and announced to his wife, B Jo, that they were moving to Seattle and opening a bookshop (fortunately they had been toying with moving here anyway, so this wasn’t quite as shocking as it could have been). In the Fall of 1989, the dream became a reality.

We are located on the cusp of Seattle’s historic Pioneer Square and just a short walk from the main retail core. Seattle Mystery Bookshop has catered to mystery fans locally and around the world for over twenty-three years.

We carry a wide range of both new and used books within the genre: noir, cozy, espionage, classics, historical, urban fantasy, kids, local, and much more. We love nothing more than to introduce people to authors and books they have never seen before.

JB, the current owner of SMB, is always working hard to stay on top of upcoming releases for our quarterly newsletter and interesting stories for our weekly newzine.

We also specialize in hard-to-find, collectible, and signed first editions. This specialization is due to fantastic support from our authors! We have signings almost every week, from the big names—Lee Child, Walter Mosley, Craig Johnson, Lawrence Block, Jo Nesbø and many, many more—to authors publishing their first book: Urban Waite, Kat Richardson, Ernest Cline, Yasmine Galenorn, Dana Stabenow, Anthony Bourdain . . . well, you get the picture—as well as authors whose names you don’t yet recognize. We love all our authors and their books!

We also specialize in Northwest mysteries (a whole wall is dedicated to them), authors who are either from the Pacific Northwest or books that are set here.

A mystery bookshop wouldn’t be complete without having its own in-house Inquiry Agent; unfortunately, the post is currently vacant. We only have the door now, as our agent retired to be with his books a few years back.

Posted: Dec 11, 2013

Category: Akashic in Good Company | Tags: Akashic in Good Company, Indie Bookstore Spotlight, Indie Bookstore Tour, Seattle Mystery Bookshop