If you, like me, enjoy reading books featuring a bookstore, a library, an author, or, in this case, a bookbinder, you might enjoy the one I just finished—The Echo of Old Books, by Barbara Davis. I last encountered Davis as the author of The Keeper of Happy Endings, which featured another of my passions (Paris), and although that one wasn’t a favorite, it was well written enough that I was willing to give another book of hers a try, particularly given the theme.

Ashlyn Greer is a dealer in rare books, whose small, eclectic New Hampshire shop sits in the front room of her real income-generating activity, the restoration of old or damaged volumes. In addition to doing custom work by request, Ashlyn is constantly on the lookout for some rare find in a remainders box at the local library or thrift shop that she can restore and sell. Ashlyn has a secret gift whose scientific name is psychometry…

In Ashlyn’s case, this extrasensory perception is limited to books. She can feel an echo of the owner or reader of the book, if their emotions were strong enough while the book was in their possession.

One day Ashlyn lucks into a find of two beautifully bound books that present something of a mystery: There are no authors listed, nor publishers nor dates, and the books are apparently the story of a doomed romance told from either side, one by the woman, the other by the man involved, each addressing the other in the first person as if writing a long letter. Ashlyn is intrigued by what purpose these books could have served, and overwhelmed by the raw emotion she feels pulsating from both of them.

She starts to investigate the mystery, first by reading the books and then by attempting to find out where they came from before she found them in a box of otherwise worthless donations at her friend Kevin’s store. The dual story takes her back four decades (The Echo of Old Books is set in 1984, and the books in the story were written in 1941) to a love affair between unequal partners—a pampered heiress and a footloose newspaperman—and also leads her to a descendent of one of these lovers, in the course of her quest to get more information.

I really liked the way the book was laid out—the scene-setting in 1984, followed by alternating chapters of the two mystery books and then a new chapter with Ashlyn’s reaction to what she has read. There are powerful themes expressed in the two old books: They explore the growing anti-Semitism amongst some wealthy and influential Americans in the ramp-up to World War II, and also comment extensively on the roles of affluent women, who seemingly had it all but were in fact marriageable chess pieces used by their fathers to capture more wealth and power.

The book was a little long, and the beginning was drawn out to the point where I almost lost interest, but that interest was renewed by some book-binding details and the introduction of an intriguing new character, and I’m glad I kept reading this story about tragic endings and second chances. I will happily add it to my Goodreads list of “books about books.”