The casino was lit up with neon, chandeliers, and the sparkle of the slot machines. Jule walked past men in sports jerseys, pensioners, party girls, and a large group of librarians wearing conference badges.
First of all, thank you St. Paul Public Library for owning this small-press, originally self-published mystery and sharing it with me via Interlibrary Loan.
The protagonist is the ultimate anti-heroine, a fat, middle-aged Black lady. She's smart, capable, self-deprecating but not too, and has the obligatory detective novel quirky pet, a green cat named Seamus.
The Southern California psychic from Shattered Moon is working with the post-Rodney King beating LAPD to find a missing child. Published in 1993, this installment isn't quite as New Agey as the first in the series. There are still a lot of protective white lights being imagined around people's hearts, and Theresa Fortunato is still attracted to boorish men, so things haven't changed too much.
I must have read Nancy Drew stories as a kid, but I have no memory of it. Isn't it funny that you can spend hours of your life doing something and not remember it? Anyway, for whatever reason I decided I needed to read a Nancy Drew and like any good book junkie, I wanted to start with the first of the series. Originally published in 1930, The Secret of the Old Clock is terribly quaint, but Nancy is no delicate flower. In this installment she changes a flat tire nearly rescues herself by force from a locked closet. The whole time I was reading it, I was seeing it as found theater. I am half tempted to stage a reader's theater version starring members of Radical Reference, including one person narrating.
The second in librarian Barbara Fister's Anni Kosinken mystery series, Through the Cracks makes me sad. Sad because it's so good, that I think Barbara could ditch librarianship and be a full-time writer. She's a really good librarian, so it would be a serious loss to the profession.
I read this book while in the process of packing up the apartment I lived in for the last ten years. I needed something that was...easy. Industrial Magic, like it's prequel went down easy. I still find narrator Paige Winterbourne a little middle-aged for a 23-year-old, but the story is damned absorbing.
As regular readers of my blog and zine know, I'm interested in books and other media that feature librarians as characters (or are written by librarians). I'm especially fond of librarian characters that offer realistic portrayals of the profession, like this one does. 42-year-old Meg McLean, the new county library director in a small northwestern community, is one of the two protagonists of this "Latouche County Mystery." Her co-tagonist is, of course, a cop, cuz this is a detective story.