Nellie H. Steele Audiobooks

Shelving Magic: an eighty-hour boxed set of bookish, magical mystery

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.1/5 average

305 listener ratings

Who is Nellie H. Steele?

Shelving is a librarian’s verb, and setting it beside magic sets up the joke the series title is making: the everyday business of putting books back where they belong, and something considerably less ordinary going on among them. Nellie H. Steele’s Shelving Magic reaches us gathered into a complete boxed set.

Our catalogue files it across crime and thriller and fantasy at once, and for a series of this kind that overlap is the point rather than a filing error. Mystery supplies the engine, the puzzle that has to be solved by the final chapter; the fantasy element supplies the rules that make the puzzle unlike anyone else’s. Blending them is harder than it looks, since a magical solution can dissolve a mystery entirely unless the limits are set early and then honoured.

Nellie H. Steele in audiobooks

Dana Allen reads the complete run, more than eighty hours of it, which makes this one of the longer single listings anywhere on our shelves. Several hundred listeners have rated the set, leaving it just above four stars, a solid figure for a bundle generally chosen by people already committed to the series.

The boxed set is the obvious way in, since it puts the instalments in order and removes the business of tracking down what comes next. Treat it as a long project rather than a weekend: a bookish mystery run of this size is the sort of thing listeners keep going right through a winter. Details and the current rating are set out below.