Sherry Thomas takes a break from historical mysteries to turn her hand to a contemporary one featuring four librarians from Austin, Texas, whose quiet, ordinary lives are suddenly turned upside down by the murders of two patrons. The Librarians is clever and very well put-together, but I found it difficult to get into; there’s a lot of scene setting and character work, which is fine, but it took too long for the mystery to really get going, I didn’t really connect with any of the characters, and the use of third-person present tense – never a favourite of mine – put distance between me and the story, and made some passages confusing to read.

The story begins on the day Hazel Lee begins her new job at the small public library in Austin, Texas. She comes from an ultra-wealthy Singaporean family, and although she was born in the US, has spent most of her life in Singapore. She’s back in the US in order to spend some time with her elderly grandmother, who encouraged her to apply for the library job. Hazel’s new colleagues, Sophie – the manager – Jonathan and Astrid, are all very welcoming, and Hazel settles to work, dealing easily with the regular patrons and efficiently with a man who starts talking to her about a movie-producer friend who is looking at a script about a murder in a library and tells her he’s there to do some research.

Watching from across the room, Astrid is stunned. She knows this man – she spent a blissful week with him six months earlier, fell in love with him, even, but he left and has ghosted her; this is the first time she’s set eyes on him since he disappeared. When he – Perry – sees Astrid, he tries to speak to her and starts apologising, but Astrid doesn’t want to hear it and shuts him down.

The last thing Astrid expects is to see Perry again – certainly not to see him brawling in the library with some random patron. Perry doesn’t even know why the other guy went for him and leaves, refusing the offer to make a police report. Later that evening, the library holds its first ever Game-Night, an evening of tabletop gaming which, given it’s almost Halloween, will be murder-mystery themed. Astrid is a little worried that the turnout will be low, but when the time comes, there are a respectable number of people there, including Sophie’s very bright sixteen-year-old daughter, Elise, a young couple who had asked about the event earlier in the day, and a woman in robes and headscarf, clearly meant to be a fortune teller.

The evening goes off well, and life continues uneventfully until the day after Halloween, when the news breaks about a woman found dead in her car, and the librarians recognise her as the fortune teller from Game Night. Then a pair of detectives arrives asking to speak with Astrid about Perry – who has also been found dead.

Two murders linked to the library. Two murders that threaten to expose long-buried secrets our four librarians would prefer stay that way. But if they’re going to get to the bottom of the mystery, find the murderer and save themselves from a similar fate, they’ll have to trust each other with those secrets – and learn to let them go.

If you’ve read any of Sherry Thomas’ Lady Sherlock historical mysteries, you’ll know she can craft a complex, intricate plot that includes a lot of seemingly disparate elements, and then slowly pull them all together to reveal the big-picture-connection between them all. She does that in The Librarians, too, but with a lesser degree of success – which I put down to pacing issues, characters I found hard to care about, and there simply being too many moving parts. It took me until around the halfway point to really get into the story – the first half felt like such a slog! – and I might have given up had I not accepted it for review (and I can’t believe I’m talking about DNF-ing a Sherry Thomas book!) The biggest problem I had was with the amount of PoV-hopping, which made it really difficult to properly get to know any one of the characters; just as I’d start getting comfortable with one of them, the chapter ended and the next one started with a completely different scene, a different perspective, a different secret, and I’d have to wait to get back to whoever I’d been reading about several chapters later. These PoV switches sometimes involve flashbacks as well, and while I generally enjoy that device when employed well, here it just adds to the overall feeling of everything being too fragmented. I felt like I was trying to do a jigsaw puzzle where I not only didn’t have a picture for reference, I didn’t even know what the picture the puzzle was supposed to make!

Another note on the flashbacks; some are separate chapters, which is fine, but – and here’s where the present tense narration is really unhelpful – some of them are incorporated into chapters which are set mostly in the present of the story. The use of the present tense for these sections made it hard to work out what was happening ‘now’ and what was happening ‘then’.

I’m not sure if it’s the way the characters are introduced – in such a choppy manner – that made it hard for me to really connect with any of them apart from Jonathan, a shy former college football player who has finally found somewhere to belong and who feels like the most ‘everyman’ of the bunch. Elegant and poised Hazel is a successful businesswoman in her own right and is just a bit too perfect; Astrid is a mess of insecurities who has spent much of her adult life pretending to be something she isn’t (for dumb reasons); Sophie is fiercely protective of her daughter – and her backstory is quite heartrending – but while her determination to keep herself at something of a remove from those around her makes sense, it also makes her hard to know as a character.

While The Librarians is a mystery rather than a romance, there are romantic threads running through the story, some of which work better than others; and some of the “life-altering secrets” promised by the blurb are are actually fairly mundane.

The impression I’m left with is of a clever, well-plotted but rather cerebral book. I did like the way the four leads come together to thwart the bad-guys and how they have each other’s backs no question, and my brain can appreciate the skill that has gone into creating it, but other than the one teeny bit of romance I liked, it lacks heart.

Once the plot starts to come together I started to enjoy the book and was able to really get into the story, but the stuggle to get into the first half brings the grade down. I can’t, in all conscience, give The Librarians less than a B- because of the quality of the writing and the tightness of the plotting, but I can’t wholeheartedly recommend it, either. If you read more mysteries than I do, perhaps it will work better for you than it did for me.