1st in a series. "You're a librarian, not a detective," Catherine Penny's daughter reminds her. But Catherine, suddenly single in her sixties, finds it easy to slip into sleuthing mode when she leaves behind New York City and a failed marriage for a lovely 17th century cottage in the idyllic English village of Far Wychwood.

In the town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia, not much happens. The highlight of 35-year-old Ave Maria Mulligan's week comes on Friday, with the arrival of the Bookmobile, the sight of which sends her into raptures. Her favorite book concerns the ancient Chinese art of reading faces. Through her face-readings, we come to understand the hostilities simmering within her family.

1st in a series. The beating of a gentle minister inside his church and a hate message on one wall launch wry-witted librarian Juanita Wills on a quest to learn who's shattering the peace in her small Oklahoma town. Defying her policeman boyfriend's warning against amateur sleuthing, Juanita decodes a mysterious cipher bookmark, goes on a "stakeout" and tracks a secret local militia.

1st in a series. James Henry is the head librarian of Quincy Gap, Virginia. A former English lit professor at William and Mary, he moves back to the Shenandoah Valley to take care of his father. When he joins a supper club to improve his social life, murder interrupts their delicious meals. Yummy recipes included.

Codex drops up-and-coming investment banker wunderkind Edward Wozny into a powerful client's commission to uncrate and organize a medieval library. The diversion quickly becomes an obsession after he enlists the help of attractive scholar Margaret Napier. They discover the mysterious Duchess of Bowmry, is in a race with her husband to locate an apocryphal codex that could destroy the Bowmry name.

Retired school librarian Darby Matheson can't seem to avoid getting tangled in other people's problems. Darby gets wrapped up in her first murder investigation in her hometown of Dulcinea, Texas when a woman she is less than fond of is found strangled to death and Darby's former student Isaac Molina is accused.

1st in the series. Jordan Poteet has left a thriving publishing career back East to return to his home town in Mirabeau, Texas-a town as backward and insulated as any cliche-to care for his ailing mother and work as the local librarian. Quickly, Jordan is accused of the gruesome murder of a nasty, churchgoing town elder who is at odds with the library's "liberal" policies.

In this tantalizing tale of Victorian ghost stories and family secrets, timid, solitary librarian Gerard Freeman lives for just two things: his elusive pen pal Alice and a story he found hidden in his mother's drawer years ago.

The short story "Quiet Please" features a libidinous librarian who takes on all, uh, comers in the back room. One of sixteen stories in this collection.

If you don't get the title's allusive pun, you won't get far into this long, densely textured, multi-referential, and brilliant novel. It demands that a reader make connections between such diversities as the genetic code and musical notation, Flemish art and biological nomenclature, the logic of computer systems and the Dewey decimal classification, cartography and chemistry.

Alexander Short is a reference librarian who spends his days dealing with the minutiae of his work world. At night he goes home to his French wife who makes pop-up books and other three-dimensional volume. Two such people seem made for each other, but their obsessions make for a rocky marriage.

1st in a series. Antonia Darcy is both a mystery writer and a librarian. Working at London's tony Military and Naval Club offers her the opportunity to meet a widower, Major Payne, who is as sharp as he is attractive. Antonia will need his help as she sets about solving a 25-year-old mystery.

This chronologically arranged work analyzes the stereotypical image of librarians, male and female. The work describes each film and then examines its librarian - considering every aspect from socio-economic conditions and motivations for leaving or not leaving the library, to personal attributes and entanglements with the opposite sex, to commonly used props, plot situations and lines ("Shush!").

Contributions from such major figures as Borges, Cheever, Alice Munro and Ray Bradbury carry the day in In the Stacks: Short Stories about Libraries and Librarians, assembled by former librarian Michael Cart (My Father's Scar). Borges's well-known "The Library of Babel" is the best of the bunch, with its thought-provoking musings on the possibilities of an "infinite" library.

This a vastly entertaining and functional guide to "good and interesting fiction featuring librarians" published in English during the last century. Listed are eligible works that feature characters who are librarians (not paraprofessional library workers) and who had a significant role in the work.

1st in the series. Meet Miss Zukas, the very proper, exceedingly conscientious, and relentlessly curious local librarian of tiny Bellehaven, Washington and one heck of an amateur sleuth! The Bellehaven police are baffled when a dead body turns up right in the middle of the library's fiction stacks. Librarian Zukas investigates.

1st in a series. Meet Marmalade (an orange and white tabby) and her partner Biscuit McKee a small town librarian. No one in Martinsville, a small town in northeastern Georgia, admits to knowing why Harlan Schneider was in the library. Clues seem to point to some local, but nobody asked Marmalade.

Sexy Librarian introduces us to Audrey Reed, a New York artist who trades her hip urban life for a job at a small public library in Minnesota. Away from the frenetic art world, Audrey hopes to find herself, and with the help of some hard words and hot nights, she succeeds.

This clever and inventive tale works on three levels: as an intriguing science fiction concept, a realistic character study and a touching love story. Henry De Tamble is a Chicago librarian with "Chrono Displacement" disorder; at random times, he suddenly disappears without warning and finds himself in the past or future, usually at a time or place of importance in his life.

1st in the series. Bewitched meets Murder She Wrote in this delightful new cozy mystery series featuring Ophelia Jensen, small town librarian and reluctant psychic, and her grandmother Abby, a benevolent witch.