The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections

What a fun debut novel by a new author, Eva Jurczyk.  She is a librarian writing about libraries. What could be more fun for a bibliophile ???

This is a entertaining mystery novel without a murder.  I kept waiting at the beginning for a murder but though there will be dead bodies at the requisite places in the story no one is murdered.  So a love story about libraries and their dedication and devotion to their books and how far one will go to savior the desire to hold a rare and priceless book in their hands.

This is also an interesting discussion about preserving first editions and the science of carbon dating old manuscripts to find out their real origins.  

Of course there is the plot of people's lives and how they interact.  The people who work together for years and how well they know each other or maybe don't really know each other.  The marriages, their ups and downs.  Coming back to work as an older woman about to retire, Leisel takes over the library's rare book room while her former boss, Chris is in the hospital in a coma. Leisel has many important decisions to make as a rare book goes missing.  Then a fellow employee is missing and the pressure is building from the University President and a group of major donors are waiting for the return of the missing book.

How Leisel and her fellow librarians handle the mysteries unfolding in the library keeps the reader interested in where all these problems will converge and how they will be resolved.