BURIED IN THE STACKS
by Allison Brook
At a ghost’s direction, a librarian solves a colleague’s murder.
No one much likes Dorothy Hawkins, reference librarian at the Clover Ridge public library. She’s snappy with patrons and malicious toward co-workers, even kind and gentle Carrie Singleton (Read and Gone, 2018, etc.), director of programs and events. But when Dorothy slips on the ice, it’s Carrie (recently elevated to the post of Sunshine Delegate for the library) who visits her in the hospital, where Dorothy confides that she thinks her husband is trying to kill her. So naturally, when Dorothy does die in a car crash, it’s Carrie who investigates, to the dismay of both the local police chief and her boyfriend, Dylan , who’s on assignment in Atlanta and can’t actually look after Carrie. What seals the deal for Carrie is the insistence of Evelyn Havers, the library’s resident ghost, that Dorothy’s death really was murder and that the same person who killed Dorothy may have killed Evelyn years ago. Once she’s on the case, Carrie risks it all, even the life of Smoky Joe, her pet cat who serves as the library’s mascot, to solve the murder of a woman everyone insists is better off dead. Brook hits all the marks: cat, ghost, damsel in distress, and boyfriend edging ever closer to matrimony but still enticingly out of reach.
A cavalcade of coziness.