★★☆☆☆: 2 stars.
Bookshops & Bonedust is the second book by Travis Baldree and a prequel to Legends & Lattes, following not the adventures of the orc mercenary Viv, but what happens while she is stuck in a small seaside town called Murk recovering from a leg injury. Wikipedia tells me that Baldree has described his work as 'cozy fantasy', a description that I used independently to describe them by analogy to the 'cozy cat books' genre that my wife has been reading a lot of. Rather than epic fantasy with lots of travel, world-building, and sword and sorcery, L&L and B&B have relaxed scenery, gentle relationships, and where there is threat it threatens the livelihood of a small business, rather than the lives of a city. There's also a running thread of home/self improvement, that reminds of the 'levelling up' sections of LitRPG stories, or of those YouTube channel where people pressure clean a drive or tidy up a hoarder's house.
I would give L&L a 3 star rating, a solid and enjoyable book that I would recommend to someone in the right circumstances, and on starting B&B I thought I would give it the same rating. It was an easy read, and I was enjoying the way it presented the characters and town. Some of the author's quirks in world-building and character presentation aren't what I would have done, but I'm willing to forgive them for an overall good read.
Sadly though, this book has ended up a DNF for me, hence the 2 star rating. Somewhere in the middle third of the book we meet a new character, who is a skeletal servant who used to serve a wandering big bad, and who now joins up with the protagonists. I found the way the other character related to the introduction of a skeletal servant less than convincing. The other characters jumped immediately and unquestioningly a conclusion that felt tremendously out-of-place in the world they live in, and over the next 3 pages I felt my suspension of disbelief in the setting collapse, and became fully aware that these were not real characters, and that instead I was getting a tract from the author, who failed to disguise his own opinions well enough within the story to be plausible. With no suspension of disbelief I couldn't continue with the book, and put it down there, and read the rest of the spoilers online.
I would only recommend this book to people who not that sensitive to author tracts, or who don't mind gaps in their character building. You might be willing to grant the author the concessions he needs to pull this off, in which case you would enjoy this book; certainly if the skeletal servant had stayed out of the story I would have enjoyed it and probably have given it 3 stars. As it is, I probably won't be picking up Baldree's next book unless it gets rave reviews or a friend persuades me to try it out again.