Larkspur Library Mystery

When in doubt, go to the library...and solve the murder mystery! Greta Plank, library director in the small, lakeside town of Larkspur, Wisconsin, prefers her rose-tinted glasses extra rosy, thank you very much. It's how she copes with the hard stuff in life...like her sister's death and her ex-boyfriend's deception. But Greta's cheery resolve takes a hit when she stumbles upon a dead body on her way home from work. What she assumes is a terrible accident Greta soon learns is something more sinister, and to make matters worse, a new-to-town detective cites her as not only his primary source for the case, but his top suspect. To clear her name and save her reputation, Greta decides to do some off-the-books clue cataloging of her own. After all, asking questions is what she does best. With the help of her fellow librarians and her lawyer mom, Greta flips through the pages of the murder, uncovering details about Larkspur's real estate market and the deceased's rare book collection as she tries to understand why anyone would have authored his death. With friends and neighbors stacking up as both victims and suspects, Greta must cross reference the facts and put a hold on her idyllic worldview if she wants to get the full story without paying the fine of her life.

A librarian's rule for sleuthing: Better to be bookish than brash! Spring has sprung, and with it, a full line-up of programming at Larkspur Community Library. Director Greta Plank is preparing to host the Wisconsin Library Organization's annual conference-and dreading the arrival of her ex-boyfriend-while also helping a local treasure-hunting club coordinate a showcase highlighting Northern Wisconsin's gangster trail and the nearby hideouts of the notorious criminals of the early twentieth century. When Greta overhears the library board president and a larger-than-life member of the treasure-hunting club arguing about a secret discovery, her curiosity is piqued-even more so when one of the women leaves a book with a sequence of strange markings on its pages in the library book return bin. Before Greta can ask about the marginalia, the book's outspoken owner turns up dead. At the request of the police-though against the better judgment of her new beau, Detective Mark McHenry-Greta sets to work trying to decipher the peculiar notations, and she quickly hypothesizes that there's more to the story. Was something sketchy going on at the deceased's jewelry shop? Did her death have anything to do with the gangster trail event she was helping to plan and the personal research she was bragging about? Greta must work against the clock to decode the dead woman's book code. What she finds is someone willing to go to great lengths to keep a secret buried in the stacks-and the past-even if it means killing again.

Librarian Greta Plank is hard at work planning and preparing for Larkspur's Fall Festival and regional tourism showcase which, if successful, will be a boon to the local economy. But disaster strikes and chances of a positive review look slimmer than a periodical's spine when a series of pranks escalates and one of Larkspur's own is found dead the same day the reporter is set to arrive. Desperate to defend her town's character and get to the bottom of the circulating mayhem, Greta begins indexing suspects. Could the crimes be an outside job, undertaken by someone intent on harming the town's reputation? Or is someone closer to home trying to ruin Larkspur from the inside? With destruction of property, sabotage, and strange animal mishaps piling up on top of murder, Greta wouldn't recommend this 'choose your own (disastrous) adventure' to anyone. In the end, she must decide who she can trust so she can close the book on these crimes before the shadowy vandal authors another kill.