THE BROKEN SPINE

St. James kicks off a new series showcasing a librarian risking all to save her beloved books.

Trudell Becket is assistant to the formidable Lida Farnsworth at the library in Cypress, South Carolina. Mayor Goodvale and town manager Duggar Hargrove, determined to turn Cypress into the Silicon Valley of the South, have converted the library into a high-tech space free of books. Nothing daunted, Tru and her friends Tori Green and Flossie Finnegan-Baker have turned unused basement space into a shadow library by rescuing books headed for the town dump and quietly doling them out to technophobic readers. After the women spend a night moving books with the help of Tori’s potential new boyfriend, Charlie, morning breaks with a tremendous crash that sends Tru upstairs, where she finds Hargrove squashed under a massive bookshelf. Tru can’t tell the truth without revealing the hidden library, and her silence has the police, especially newly returned Jace Bailey, suspicious of her. Nor has she trusted Jace ever since he romanced her and then stole her high school term paper. So she and her friends decide to find the killer on their own. Luke Goodvale, the mayor’s son, who's recently moved home from Nevada, turns out to have a dangerous debt collector after him. Anne Lowery, the tech specialist who set up the new book-free library, is furious when the mayor gives all the credit to Luke. But is she mad enough to kill? Tru fights her attraction to Jace and the comedy of errors that breaks out when everyone involved suspects everyone else.

A gritty heroine downplays the Southern charm to focus on a complex crime.