Book Review: The Dead Letter Delivery by C. J. Archer

The Dead Letter Delivery
Author: C. J. Archer
Series: The Glass Library (Book 4)
Publication: Self Published (March 5, 2024)

Description: The discovery of long-lost mail delivers a marriage proposal, a missing person, and a magical mystery.

A road trip with Gabe and her friends leads Sylvia to discover more about her mother’s veiled past yet throws up several questions, too. The stack of unopened letters addressed to her family will hopefully provide answers. As she delves into the contents, a startling revelation emerges: the letters allude to a clandestine union between two magician families, hinting at the elusive identity of Sylvia’s father.

Full of hope, she embarks on a quest to find the author of the letters, only to discover an artless youth who vanished decades ago, a dead man with the wrong name, and a hospital for former soldiers that connects them. The further Sylvia and Gabe delve into these mysteries, the more lies they expose, including long-buried secrets that certain individuals will stop at nothing to protect.

When danger strikes, Sylvia wonders if finding answers is worth the risk.

My Thoughts: The fourth book in the Glass Library continues threads begun in earlier books. Sylvia is still on a quest to find out more about her mysterious mother and the magical gift for paper that she has discovered in herself. 

A road trip with Gabe and her friends leads her to discover who her mother was but not what she did in the years before she died. A cache of dead letters reveals a possible suitor for her mother who could have potentially been her father. 

Most of the story is spent trying to track down this mysterious suitor which leads to stolen identities and a shady doctor running a hospital which is now trying to cure shell-shocked World War I victimes but which had earlier been a site for the artless of magical families who wanted to see if their magic could be activated by medical treatment. 

Sylvia learns to use a paper spell which strengthens paper and proves (mostly to herself) that she is an actual paper magician. However, questions about who her father was are still left unresolved.

Also unresolved is her growing relationship with Gabe. 

This was an engaging episode in the series even with the slowest of slow-burn romances. I like the worldbuilding and the setting of an England in an alternate 1920 which is mostly like our own but with the addition of magic. 

I bought this one March 8, 2024. You can buy your copy here.