Most of the time, Real Life is good, you know? It’s real and it’s life…better than the alternative (Heaven, not withstanding). Sometimes, though, I read a book and want more than anything to crawl into it and live there. A book where the heroine gets swept away by a dashing Englishman who loves books. I just finished just such a book called, of all things, Killer Librarian by Mary Lou Kirwin.

Librarian Karen Nash has just been dumped by her plumber boyfriend (no pun intended:). The second worst part is that it happened just hours before they were supposed to board a plane on Karen’s Dream Trip…England, Sigh…The very worst part is that he took the trip with another woman, a  younger, skinnier, prettier woman. Karen knows this because she decided that she WAS going to England, no matter what, and happened to be on the same plane as they were. For much of the flight, she had murder on her mind. She plotted the hours away even though it didn’t make her feel much better. Upon her arrival at “their” B & B, she finds the owner a quintessentially English gentleman .  Still she plotted. At a pub, one evening, she was quite drunk (English beer is quite a bit stronger than the American variety), and blathered her sad story to a young man at the bar. Rather cryptically, he replies “Not to worry. Dave will be taken care of. I’ll make sure of it.” She thought little of it at the time but later, her sober mind kicked in and she felt guilty. Still, she was in LONDON so she did what any self-respecting librarian would do…she wandered the streets of London as she would the shelves in a library. She was pleasantly surprised to find that Caldwell, the B & B owner, was also a bibliophile and had a wonderful collection of books for her to peruse. They would sit at the breakfast table and talk about their favorite authors, books, characters, anything bookish. Karen soon found herself noticing how handsome he was and how charming. During a trip to Hay-on-the Wye, a tiny town with more bookshops than most large cities, they realized how alike they were and how much they enjoyed spending time together.They were falling in love.

So where’s the “killer” part? Well, you’ll just have to read the book to find out…and just see if you, too, don’t want to become a killer librarian!

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