When I spotted Laura Sims’ How Can I Help You on NetGalley it reminded me of Alice Slater’s dark, funny Death of a Bookseller which I inhaled last year. Set in a library, Sims’ novel follows Margo, who’s not at all who her colleagues think she is, and Patricia, a frustrated writer, new to the small town where she’s taken up the post of reference librarian.
I’m not interested in the young anyway, so it was easy to leave them be. Throbbing with health as they are, insolent and arrogant in their certainty of immortal life.
Once an ICU nurse, Margo has been working as a circulation assistant at Carlyle Public Library for two years. She’s adopted the sunny persona she usually does for the many new jobs she’s taken up, accepted by her colleagues who see her as a good sport, rushing home every day to a scalding bath and memories of the many patients she’s helped along. When Patricia arrives, Margo’s slightly rattled but determined to make friends with this new member of staff who wrestles with the urge to write after promising her partner she’d stop and get a proper job. Margo and Patricia bond over coffee, Margo uncharacteristically letting slip a detail about her past that fans Patricia’s writerly curiosity already ignited by her discovery of Margo apparently trying to save an elderly patron, collapsed in the toilet. Patricia spends her days writing in her notebook when she should be doing her job while Margo begins to unravel, increasingly suspicious of her new colleague.
I’ve spent my life caring for real human beings, and she’s spent hers caring for dead words written on paper from dead trees.
As ever with crime fiction, I’ve tried to keep that synopsis brief and spoiler free, helped by Margo’s introduction of herself so that we know from the start she’s running away from a nefarious past. Her narrative alternates with Patricia’s ratcheting up the tension nicely culminating in a breakneck race to the denouement which fit the novel well. There’s lots of dark humour to enjoy – I particularly liked Margo’s discovery of Shirley Jackson, having hardly read a novel in her life. Sims is careful not to make Margo a caricature. She’s a woman who thinks of herself as helping people, whether it’s how to find a book or easing their passage so to speak. In her acknowledgements, Sims tells her readers she’s drawn from a crime podcast based on a real ‘Jolly Jane’, but this is very clearly a work of fiction. It’s my second crime novel this year – Louise Welsh’s To the Dogs was the first – and I thoroughly enjoyed it but it’ll probably be the last for a while. Too tricky to review without giving anything away.
Verve Books Harpenden 9780857308757 224 pages Hardback (read via NetGalley)
I think I have read a review of this book somewhere else, or maybe it was on this blog. The premise sounds interesting, is Patricia mining Margo’s story for a book or trying to solve a mystery??
It was published yesterday, although I did prview it. Patricia’s spotted an irresistible opportunity for a book, although she needs to solve the mystery to write it!
This sounds a very tempting mix of tense and fun! I’ll look out for it.
Crime fiction for bibliophiles!
If you’re going through an enjoying-crime-fiction patch, why not indulge yourself? You don’t then HAVE to review them! I’m tempted by this one.
Indeed, I don’t, but I already watch far too much of it on TV!
This one was published here last year so I’m happy to say it’s on the library shelves!
I wonder what if librarians favoured this one!
I will be checking my library for this one. Sounds as though it would make a terrific television series.
No there’s an idea! Two great female leads.
I like the sound of this one very much. I think the mix of dark and funny will work well for me.
I think this one would suit you well, Mallika.
This sounds really intriguing. I’m in the middle of planning a sort of essay on this rush of novels that feature the Author-as-Awful-Person and it sounds like it might fit the brief!
Interesting topic for an essay. The author character is certainly an opportunist as are the ones in Andrew Lipstein’s Last Resort and Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth