One Book in the Grave: 04/21/16

One Book in the Grave by Kate Carlisle is the fifth in the Bibliophile Mystery series. Brooklyn is hired to rebind a copy of Beauty and the Beast only to realize on seeing it that it's stolen property. She surfacing of this book leads to murder and questions about a friend who died years ago.

I originally started reading this series for the book binding aspect. When the main character is allowed to focus on her job there's a lot of fascinating technical information woven into the stories. More and more though it seems that the emphasis is switching away from Brooklyn's skills as a binder and book restorer to her former life in a Sonoma hippy commune.

The problem is the hippy communes were short lived and pretty much over by my earliest childhood. I'm in my 40s. Brooklyn is otherwise written as if she's in her 30s but the technological and cultural mise-en-scene of this series is contemporary, meaning it's put in the second decade of the twenty-first century. If that is the case, Brooklyn should be somewhere between five to ten years older than I am.

Now there's the case of the bad guys in this book. Brooklyn seems to bring out the worst in her colleagues. I don't know if book bindery is really this cut throat a profession. Really, it seems like Brooklyn has her own personal Team Rocket chasing her down and it's getting tiresome.

Two stars

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