The Librarians
by Sherry Thomas
THE LIBRARIANS (Berkley, 368 pp., $30) is a fizzy delight about four quirky colleagues at a suburban Texas library who are grappling with the aftermath of a murder mystery games night that turned all too real.
After two patrons are found dead, it doesn’t take long for the four librarians to realize that both had ties to the library. So they decide to work together to find the murderer, even though it means revealing their most closely held secrets to one another. As Thomas unspools their tangled, messy lives, she shows how they all found refuge in the library, thriving in its daily comic chaos of clogged toilets, screaming children and difficult patrons. (At one point a creepy old guy with a comb-over approaches the desk asking for “Fifty Shades of Grey,” saying, “That’s the book my lady friend recommends.” The librarian helping him, Hazel, “will bet her collection of BTS photocards that said lady friend is of the inflatable variety.”)
Thomas, a seasoned suspense and romance writer, is in utter command of the story and its many surprising twists. But she is especially adroit at depicting her main characters, who learn how to trust one another and themselves.
What About the Bodies
by Ken Jaworowski
Jaworowski, a playwright and editor at the The New York Times, established his noir bona fides with his 2023 debut novel, “Small Town Sins,” and now he cements his genre creds with WHAT ABOUT THE BODIES (Atlantic Crime, 276 pp., $28), which explores the ways poverty, avarice and kindness intersect in small-town Pennsylvania.
At first, Carla, Reed and Liz have nothing much to do with one another. Carla, a single mom, gets the shock of her life when her college-age son confesses something terrible to her. Reed, who’s just lost his own mother, is determined to keep a promise he made to her, no matter how impossible it seems. And Liz hopes she can make it as a musician, despite some outstanding debt she still needs to pay off — and the person she owes is capable of anything, including murder.
As their lives move toward a convergence point, I gulped every word down, surrendering to the propulsive pace as the narrative grew unbearably tense. “What About the Bodies” leaves a lasting mark.
A Murderous Business
by Cathy Pegau
Operating a business is no picnic in any era, but for Margot Baxter Harriman, one of the main characters in Pegau’s A MURDEROUS BUSINESS (Minotaur, 297 pp., $28), taking over the family’s food canning company in 1912 is especially vexing. And that’s before she comes to work one day and discovers her father’s former assistant, the redoubtable Mrs. Gilroy, dead at her desk, along with a partially written note alluding to corporate misdeeds.
Margot knows she needs help. Her family’s reputation, and her own, are on the line. She reaches out to a private investigator, Loretta “Rett” Mancini, who understands instantly what Margot is worried about: the possibility that her father might have been cutting safety corners in the name of profits, putting customers at risk. Rett agrees to go undercover at B & H Foods to see if she can figure out what is going on.
Both women have worked in the shadows of larger-than-life fathers; both are queer. Solving the meaning of Mrs. Gilroy’s note, as well as her murder, means reckoning with the most intimate aspects of themselves.
Oxford Soju Club
by Jinwoo Park
The specter of national identity hangs over OXFORD SOJU CLUB (Dundurn Press, 232 pp., paperback, $19.99), an espionage debut that brings together North and South Korea — and breaks them apart — at the Soju Club, the only Korean restaurant in Oxford, England.
The North is represented by Yohan Kim, whose boss, the spymaster Doha, is stabbed to death in an Oxford alley. As he is dying, he tells Yohan, “Soju Club, Dr. Ryu.” The South is represented by Jihoon Lim, who opened the Soju Club when he left Seoul for England. And then there’s Yunah Choi, a Korean American C.I.A. agent assigned to ferret out a North Korean sleeper cell in Oxford who reluctantly, and not altogether successfully, investigates Doha’s killing on behalf of the agency.
Park, a Korean Canadian writer and translator, deftly maps the shifting terrain of characters whose identities are in flux and who are haunted by pasts from which they cannot escape. His novel mixes spycraft with tenderness, violence with grace, and introduces a welcome new spy fiction talent.
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