A Death Long Overdue: 12/08/20

A Death Long Overdue by Eva Gates and Elise Arsenault (narrator) is the seventh book in the Lighthouse Library mystery series and one I had completely missed when it first released. While I started reading this series in print, I've recently started re-reading them as audiobooks. On finishing the first in the series, Apple Books helpfully recommended the most recent one.

Bertie James, the director of the Bodie Island library is hosting a fortieth anniversary reunion for her library cohorts. As part of the celebration she, Lucy and the other library staff have put together a collection of items showing what library work was like in the pre-internet days.

One of the items that catches the most attention to the bafflement of the Lucy and Bertie is a coffee stained, heavily underlined copy of Celestine Prophesy. When the guest most affected by the book and it's checkout slip ends up murdered in the marsh, Lucy ends up having to discover what happened twenty-five years ago in order to solve the modern day murder.

This year marks the first year where many of the novels I've read with extended interest in decades past has covered time periods in my own life time that I remember well. It wasn't a slow but steady sliding scale either. We seem to have gone in discrete chunks from 1929 to 1940 to mid 1950s to 1963 to 1968 and now to 1980 and 1995 while bypassing the 1970s.

The mystery was complex enough to keep me guessing even if I'd figured out early on the logistics of the 1995 mystery. There are enough suspects and enough motives to make spotting the actual killer tricky. In terms of narrative flow between present and past, A Death Long Overdue is a good companion read to For Whom the Book Tolls by Laura Gail Black (2020).

Eva Gates is a pseudonym of Vicki Delany, and therefore this book qualifies for the Canadian Book Challenge even though it is set entirely in North Carolina.

Five stars

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