Bookshops & Bonedust

While [b:Legends & Lattes 61242426 Legends & Lattes (Legends & Lattes, #1) Travis Baldree https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1654581271l/61242426.SY75.jpg 94968745] was a fun, cozy low-stakes adventure that had missed its potential by an inch, Bookshops & Bonedust missed it by good ten feet.Prequels are boring when they were not planned. Viv, in Legends & Lattes, admits to being quite the bookworm but that's all this book has going for it. The characters, the adventures, antagonists, nothing from this book is mentioned in the first one. It makes for a very boring read because I know that these characters will disappear from the face of the Earth. What's worse is that many of the people Viv meets here could have been a help in establishing her coffee shop, or at the very least she should have stopped by after retiring.Again, we are with Viv who is a bloodthirsty orc yearning for a fight. She gets injured and has to stay in an ugly little coastal town. Inexplicably this town with seemingly few dozen citizens has a bookshop run by a ‘ratkin' who occasionally drops a vulgar term. While the previous book focused on the cozy, low-stakes theme of it all, for some reason Bookshops & Bonedust chooses to have stakes higher than Legends & Lattes. I cannot understand why. It's such a strange switch from an angry elf who wants an allegedly magical rock to a necromancer.There is a romance which I've forgotten about almost entirely. This should have been the focus! A cute cozy romance in a bookstore. I loved the owner of the titular bookshop Fern but I'd much prefer if the romance was between Viv and her while they rummage around in books and discover fun secrets.A step down from the first book. The Epilogue is nice but only if there is a sequel coming.