Buried in Books: 03/13/19

Buried in Books by Kate Carlisle is the twelfth in the Bibliophile mystery series. It's seta few years back when ALA had their midwinter conference at Moscone here in San Francisco. Except for this book, it's a fictional version with a slightly different name.

On the work front, Brooklyn has been invited to give a bookbinding workshop and to lead a tour of local famous book locations. The conference has reunited her with her two grad school BFFs, Heather and Sara. Except they still hate each other after Sara stole Heather's boyfriend and married him!

On the homefront, Brooklyn and Derek are getting married. It's also Brooklyn's birthday. During an unwanted surprise party, Heather and Sara each give her a book. Heather's is a well=loved copy of the Blue Fair Book. Sara's appears to be an outrageously rare book.

Through out all the brief encounters with Brooklyn, Heather and Sara there is animosity. Heather repeatedly says she wants to kill Sara. So it's no surprise when Sara ends up dead in the basement of the convention center.

Here's the thing, for Buried in Books to work, the basement of the convention center has to be dark and empty, save for things in storage, during the Not-ALA convention. That's not how convention centers work — certainly not Moscone. The basements are where the exhibitors work. I'm not talking people who have rented booths on the floor; I mean the hosts. It's where the tech support is, running their wifi hotspots, their wired internet connections. It's where pages run stuff between booths because there are hallways down there that aren't crowded with attendees. It's where the press works on their photographs.

It isn't a big, dark, oversized basement. It's not somewhere a person could be sent to work alone. And if there is a forklift involved, there is no way in Hell the convention center would left some random librarian operate it for obvious safety and liability issues.

So assuming that Brooklyn lives in an alternate reality San Francisco where OSHA doesn't exist and librarians can drive forklifts without being certified first. The mechanics of the mystery are lacking. This book is more like an AGA saga with a murder thrown in. The murder mystery from the title onwards is literal and on rails.

There are no red herrings. There is no play on words. Brooklyn isn't in the same sort of danger as previous books. It's not a very exciting mystery.

Read this one if you want to see Brooklyn get married. If you're just in this series for the whodunit, it's okay to skip this volume.

The next volume is The Book Supremacy which comes out June 4th.

Three stars

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