Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

Not quite sure how to rate this one. 2.5 stars? 2.75? Do I round up and make it 3? If I were basing it solely on most the first section, it'd be 3 stars or more. Lots of promise there. To start with, the story is set in a bookstore. What better place could there be? And there's mystery. And weird goings-on. And odd characters. Fun things that you know all link together and you want to know when and how and why. Granted the writing was a little simple and didn't always flow, but that could be hand waved away if the story is distracting enough. And it was. Until Google and the supposed love interest plopped themselves into the middle of the story and hung on for dear life. The story quickly dissolved into not much more than a love letter to the great search engine of the west with the occasional tangent to the Kindle. None of that added anything to the story and the longer they occupied good story real estate, the easier it was to set this book down. Not a good thing to happen in part 2 of a 3 part story. Part 3 picked up slightly for a moment or two, though I think more because of a couple of character introductions than anything story wise. Then, it fizzled out like a sparkler being stuck in a bucket of sand. What probably should have been an exciting, fast paced adventure to retrieve the font punches from the Warehouse 13-esque desert library felt like a walk out to your car to get the bag of chips that fell out of a grocery bag. The resolution to the great mystery was insubstantial, without any real depth or even a real Aha! moment. I really wish the last chapter had been more showing the reader what happened rather than a long tell me everything monologue. I think I just wanted more than was crammed into the short number of pages. For now - 3 stars. Because at it's heart, it's still about books.