Brand-new librarian Meg Booker is just supposed to be checking out books.
Instead, it’s the patrons who are being checked out - permanently.
April 1985. Fir Grove Library, Portland, Oregon: Big hair. Leggings. Card catalogs. Kicking kids with giant boom boxes out of the library. Meg’s got it all handled - until her boss takes off on a way-too-long vacation and leaves her in charge.
Right away, things start going wrong. Historical records disappear out of the archives. The hot new library page skateboards into work - or doesn’t - whenever he feels like it. A simmering feud boils over between two prominent and universally loathed patrons - nicknamed “The Witch” and “Leisure Suit Lothario” - leaving Meg scrambling to keep the peace.
Then the Witch turns up dead in the library conference room. The police say it’s natural causes, but Meg suspects murder - and no librarian worth her reference desk credentials leaves a question unanswered. Enlisting the aid of the library’s mystery book club, and armed with mad research skills, she sets out to prove what really happened.
But when there’s another death - and one of her friends is arrested - Meg has to unmask the real murderer before it’s too late.
A Shush Before Dying is the first book of the Meg Booker Librarian Mysteries - a cozy library mystery series set in the 1980s.