For the past thirteen years, I’ve done the same thing every weekday morning. I’d get up, stretch a little, eat a small breakfast of eggs and toast, and then walk to work. I’m the assistant librarian at the public library in the small town of Cypress, South Carolina. It’s a dream job, really. I grew up in Cypress. My life has always been here. And I get to work at the library and be surrounded by books all day, every day. How lucky can a girl get?

One of my favorite activities is to match patrons with the books they need. The other day Mrs. Gwynne Hansy came in feeling downtrodden, because no one wanted to listen to her latest gossip about our newest resident. After listening to what she had to say, I directed her to a Miss Marple mystery. Later, I helped my friend Flossie look up popular handguns from the 1930s for the book she is writing. She wouldn’t tell me anything about the plot, but I’m used to that. She’s super secretive about her writing projects.

Before the library closed for the day, I had played hero to two teens who’d let the term paper due the next day go until the last minute, helped save a camellia bush by helping identify the scale destroying the branches, and had directed a room of toddlers in an art project that involved a ridiculous amount of white paste. Have I already told you how this is my dream job? It is, it really is!

That is, until the town manager got in his mind that our town needed to do something outrageous in order to convince businesses to locate in our town. Get this, he decided our library needs to be on the cutting edge of technology and has been working to transform our peaceful sanctuary into an online, bookless wasteland.

What’s a book-lover to do? Well, I wasn’t going to sit around and let him destroy the one thing in town I love the most! That is why I did what I did. I did it for the books. That’s right. I did it to save the books.

And now the town manager is dead, and the police are pointing their suspicious fingers in my direction. And still, my library patrons need my help. So, I get up each morning, do my stretches, eat my eggs, and get to the library with a new purpose — catch whoever killed the town manager so I can get back to the business of running a library.

The Broken Spine by Dorothy St. James, Beloved Bookroom Mystery #1
Genre: Cozy
Release: January 2021
Purchase Link

Trudell Becket, known to her friends as Tru, finds herself in a bind when her library in lovely Cypress, South Carolina, is turned into a state-of-the-art bookless “technological center.” A library with no books breaks Tru’s book-loving heart so she decides to rescue hundreds of beloved tomes slated for the town dump. Under the cover of darkness, Tru, along with her best friends—coffee shop owner Tori Green and mysterious bestselling author Flossie Finnegan-Baker—set up a secret bookroom in the library’s basement and prepare to open it to their most loyal, trustworthy patrons.

But as Tru and her crew are putting the finishing touches on their new book room, the town manager, who was behind the big push for the library’s transformation, is crushed by an overturned shelf of DVDs. Tru becomes the prime suspect as she hadn’t hid the fact that she hated having all of those wonderful books replaced by tablets and computers. But if she gives the police her alibi, she’ll have to explain about the secret book room and risk losing the books.

Tru knows she’s in a heap of trouble, and it doesn’t help that the officer in charge of the case is her old crush from high school, who broke her teenaged heart. To keep herself out of jail and her beloved bookroom up and running, Tru—with the help of Tori, Flossie, and a brown tabby stray cat named Dewey Decimal—decides to investigate. And faster than you can say “Shhhh!” Tru quickly finds herself on the same page with a killer who would love to write her final chapter. . .

About the Author
Dorothy St. James is the author of The Southern Chocolate Shop Mystery series and the White House Gardener Mystery series. She makes her home in the Lowcountry of South Carolina with her husband, daughter, two needy pups, and one patient cat. She’s a member of Sister’s in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, and International Thriller Writers. This is her first Beloved Bookroom Mystery.

Follow Dorothy online at dorothystjames.com, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.

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