A fun library mystery!

This book was recommended to me by my mom of all people, as she enjoyed it and there seemed to be pretty favorable professional reviews about it. This is the first in a new series and I absolutely think this is one I’ll continue picking up in the future.

Greer Hogan is a relatively new librarian in town who hasn’t made a ton of close friends as of yet. One day while working she stumbles upon the body of one of her few friends, Joanna. Joanna was generally liked by the town overall, so her death is shrouded in mystery as no one believes she fell and died accidentally.

Greer has a history with death. She used to be a high level Marketing exec in New York but moved to this tiny town after the murder of her husband, Danny. She consistently feels guilt about not being there to save her husband, nor was she able to truly solve the mystery of who murdered him, so she dedicates herself quietly to figuring out who killed Joanna. She’s not an idiot though, and does not go out of her way to put herself in dangerous situations just to get information, and she also willingly gives a lot of the information she finds to the police.

As Greer digs deeper into the mystery of Joanna’s death so unravels more secrets that exist within the town and has to use her skills as a librarian to get to the bottom of things.

I found this to be really enjoyable. As a librarian I can tell immediately when library centric books have been written by authors who worked in a library and this author 100% captured the weird aspects of the job. There were so many little mentions of things you would only know if you worked as a librarian and that made the book feel much more authentic to me.

Overall I think the pacing of this could be improved upon as it felt like a lot of set up to finding clues and suspects before we manage to whittle down the list, which made things more confusing than they needed to be. Once the conclusion happens it seemed a bit rushed and that I was supposed to pick up on things way earlier, which confused me, but I think it’s a side effect of the pacing issues. Other than that this was a fun read with a really likable protagonist and I would continue to read the series.

Title: The Unkindness of Ravens
Author: M. E. Hilliard
Format: Hardcover
Pages: 336
ISBN:   9781643856940

Three Descriptors: Atmospheric; Suspenseful; Compelling

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