Read on Arrival: 07/16/19

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Read on Arrival by Nora Page is the second Bookmobile Mystery. Senior Librarian Cleo Watkins and her bookmobile have a new rival — a consultant who has a very different way of designing and running a bookmobile. Books are rebound in colorful shades to be fun. There are video games. And a therapy horse.

Meanwhile, realtor Dixie Huddleston has been holding onto a book about luck for about thirty years. It's the most overdue book at the library. But then she starts worrying that her luck has run out. Sure enough, she ends up murdered.

Cleo because of the book, and Belle, the consultant, end up on the top of the list of suspects. Cleo, because of the overdue book, and Belle because of the alternate to the bookmobile. Neither one is the murderer and the two do end up reluctantly working together.

To enjoy this volume (which I did), one needs to just roll with the sillier aspects of the plot. Modern bookmobiles are actually somewhere between the two extremes: Cleo's and Belle's. Library hiring is a very formalized event and it would be damn near impossible for Belle to be offered her made up position. Likewise, there's no reason for Cleo to have kept Dixie's overdue book in the catalog. She would have replaced it and charged Dixie.

Five stars

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