Synopsis

Murder at the 42nd Street Library opens with a murder in a second floor office of the iconic, beaux-arts flagship of the New York Public Library. Ray Ambler, the curator of the library’s crime fiction collection, joins forces with NYPD homicide detective Mike Cosgrove in hopes of bringing a murderer to justice.

In his search for the reasons behind the murder, Ambler uncovers hidden–and profoundly disturbing–relationships between visitors to the library. These include a celebrated mystery writer who has donated his papers to the library’s crime fiction collection, that writer’s missing daughter, a New York society woman with a hidden past, and one of Ambler’s colleagues at the world-famous library. Those shocking revelations lead inexorably to the tragic and violent events that follow.

I have ambivalent feelings about this book, on the one hand I felt that some of the characters were unnecessary to the plot and could have been eliminated, without the plot suffering, also I felt that some of the plot twists became fairly obvious at certain points of the story, I am not sure if this was the intention of the Author and I won’t go into them here as I do not want to provide any spoilers.

I did find that the main characters were well written and beautifully define and the main character of Raymond Ambler is the type of person I would very much like to meet and discuss books over a drink with.

Although part of the ending, to me was obvious, I was still moved by it and it brought a smile to my face, if you like crime stories then this is a very good read, although you may get confused by the shear number of people coming and going (who knew a research library would be so busy with people who come and go with seemingly no reason)

This is the first book in a series and I am really looking forward to finding out what Ambler gets up to next. I will definitely be buying the next one when it comes out. I only hope I don’t have to wait too long.

Con Lehane – you have another fan.

Published on the 26th April 2016

Minotaur Books

I gave this 3 out of 5* on Goodreads, I hope the next one will be a 4 at least!