STORY SUMMARY
Hayley Burke, a single British mom in her 40s (her daughter is in college) lives in Bath, England. She has landed a job as curator of Lady Georgianna Fowling's First Edition Library. The library is located in the estate home known as Middlebank House. It's a Georgian home with 2 flats. The secretary (and former personal assistant to Lady Georgianna) is Mrs Woolgar, also single, lives in the bottom floor flat. Hayley lives in the top flat. The library holds the first editions from various women authors of "the Golden Age of Mysteries". Authors such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, etc. The funny thing is: Hayley knows nothing about mysteries! She was a 19th century literature major in college!
Hayley's boyfriend lives and works in London. She rarely sees him. Hayley does visit her mum on the weekends and takes a train to get to the assisted living facility where her mum lives.
Mrs. Woolgar is opposed to any changes that Hayley wants to make to the library. Hayley wants to breathe new life into the library and the first thing she does is allow a group of wanna be mystery authors a meeting spot in the library. However, Mrs Woolgar would love to kick these fan-fiction writers out of their Wednesday evening meetings. Also, there is the added annoyance of Lady Fowling's nephew...her only living relative...Charles Henry Dill, who is trying to take over the estate and disregard the will that Lady Fowling left.
One Thursday morning one of the male members of the group (Trist) is found dead in the library! Hayley decides she will get some clues about how to solve this mystery of who killed Trist from some of the greatest mystery writers housed in the room. She plans on catching the killer and saving the library!
Will she succeed in thwarting Lady Georgianna's nephew into taking over his dead aunt's estate?? More importantly, will she discover who the killer is??
MY THOUGHTS
I was immediately drawn to this book because 1. I'm a book nerd. 2. My daughters, husband and I love British literature (although the author is an American, she has this series set in England) and 3. It's a series about a library and I love libraries as well as Agatha Christie and Jane Austen who gets mentioned often!
The main characters are very well developed from the description of their clothing to the description of their personalities.
The setting is very well done as well. Middlebank is well depicted as a sprawling Georgian mansion set on a quiet street in England.
Hayley does a great job in multi-tasking her life: she has several personal issues going on in her life; work issues as the curator of this rather odd library, and a murder that took place at Middlebank! The author does a good job at making Hayley likeable and laughable. (She has a great sense of humor).
In some ways the title of the book bugged me because of course it's so similar to Agatha Christie's mystery The Body in the Library published in 1942. However, because the setting is a library of First Edition Mysteries with Agatha Christie books being the main draw.......it does go well for the plot The really odd thing to me though is that there was only one dead body in the Middlebank library....however, again, perhaps the author wants us to think: several bodies come to the library once a week for their meeting about their fan-fiction writing: Amanda, Peter, Trist, Harry (short for Harriot) and Mariella. It's a place where friends....and foe?? gather.
If you like mysteries, a small bit of romance that isn't sappy, and a lot of good drama with some humor thrown in, you'll enjoy this book.
In my opinion this book is appropriate for ages 14 and older.
On a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest, I rate this a 9.
2 comments:
I am almost half-way finished with the book and I am really enjoying it. Thanks for this excellent review!
This sounds like one I would enjoy.
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