book: The Paris Librarian (2016) by Mark Pryor

Paris! A library! Frenchwomen! A locked-room mystery! How could there by a detective novel better designed for this particular seedy old reader?

Oh, well . . .

Hugo Marston is security head at the American Embassy in Paris; he also does some detectiving on the side with the friendly cooperation of the flics. When his friend Paul Rogers, head of the American Library, dies in unusual circumstances in a small room in the library’s basement, Hugo suspects murder, even though the autopsy reveals nothing awry.

More murders follow, and they seem to be connected with the library’s recent acquisition of some secret papers belonging to the legendary but reclusive actress Isabelle Severin. Do those papers contain long-concealed details regarding Severin’s activities during World War II, when she reputedly charmed her way for espionage purposes into the upper echelons of the Reich, even going so far as to murder a Gestapo officer?

Hugo’s hypothesis that the librarian was murdered faces another obstacle aside from the autopsy’s unfruitfulness. CC cameras trained on the door of the little room where Rogers died seem to indicate that no one went near him during the vital time period. It was about here that it occurred to me, to the accompaniment of an unwelcome intestinal lurch, that an obscure South American poison could solve quite a few of the murderer’s logistical challenges . . . and, sure enough, onto the scene swept curare, almost as if this were a mystery novel from the 1930s or 1940s. The purported use of curare indeed produced various necessary explanations; the trouble was, I didn’t find myself actually believing any of them. Yes, I’m sure you could kill someone using curare in that particular fashion, but why bother with the elaboration?

The portrayals of the Frenchwomen — let’s get our priorities right — by and large satisfied my expectations, including the refreshingly straightforward depiction of a trans cop as a normal human being rather than some kind of freak; maybe the book’s cover should bear a trigger warning for the benefit of Mike Pence. But the other characters — including, crucially, Hugo Marston himself — didn’t rise from the pages for me: I was constantly having to pause to remind myself who people were when their names turned up. I had the same sense about the Parisian settings: I’m sure they were all accurate enough, but the details on the page never conveyed to me any great feeling of place — I was reading descriptions rather than seeing the sights, hearing the sounds or smelling the smells of the various Parisian locales. Again, despite various invocations of antiquarian books and the antiquarian book trade, I was reading about the allure of bibliophilia rather than experiencing it.

I went into this novel with high hopes and came away just a bit disappointed. Pryor’s Hugo Marston series is, I know, very popular, so I’m perfectly prepared to admit this may just have been a matter of my own mood. Perhaps I’ll try another in the series in due course.