Hello,
Thank you for sharing your Spain in Books story map. I found it interesting because I am also working on a shortlist story map that skips the intermediate popup and goes straight to displaying the full Details panel. A drawback of this approach is that when a user clicks on one of the photo tiles on the left side of the page the Details panel appears (and then disappears when the user closes it), but there is no easy way to pinpoint the location of that site on the map.
The solution I came up with was to edit the tile_onMouseOver function so that when the user moves the mouse over a photo tile, then the corresponding numbered icon on the map is enlarged and is brought to the front (and of course the tile_onMouseOut function restores the numbered icon back to tiny size). The code to do this is already present elsewhere in index.html - it's just a matter of copying it into these functions.
Ben