Friday Memes: Better Off Read by Nora Page

Happy Friday everybody!

Book Beginnings on Friday is now hosted by Rose City Reader. The Friday 56 is hosted at Freda's Voice. Check out the links above for the rules and for the posts of the participants each week. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the coolest, the most intellectual. Use the CLOSEST.

Beginning:

In all her seventy-five years, Cleo Watkins had never harmed another human being. Not intentionally, and certainly not in anger. Cleo considered herself a proper, well-mannered Southern lady. She'd never harmed a book. Cleo was a librarian.

Friday 56:

Bitsy pressed her hands in prayer formation. "I was in the back, looking at cookbooks. Mama Givens was only trying to start the air-conditioning up. She said she needed to give it a boost, and we started going, but we couldn't stop it. It's like the brakes gave out. They were smooshy, and then nothing." Bitsy exhaled and lowered her voice to a whisper. "Mama may have punched the gas once or twice, but only because she was trying to get a pedal that worked."

This week I am reading Better Off Read by Nora Page. This is the debut in a new series starring a librarian as a detective. Here is the description from Amazon:

When her best hope of saving her storm-damaged library is found murdered, senior librarian Cleo Watkins hits the road in her bookmobile in search of justice.

Septuagenarian librarian Cleo Watkins won’t be shushed when an upstart young mayor threatens to permanently shelve her tiny town’s storm-damaged library. She takes to her bookmobile, Words on Wheels, to collect allies and rally library support throughout Catalpa Springs, Georgia.

However, Cleo soon rolls into trouble. A major benefactor known for his eccentric DIY projects requests all available books on getting away with murder. He’s no Georgia peach, and Cleo wonders if she should worry about his plans. She knows she should when she discovers him bludgeoned and evidence points to her best friend, Mary-Rose Garland.

Sure of Mary-Rose’s innocence, Cleo applies her librarian’s sleuthing skills to the case, assisted by friends, family, and the dapper antiquarian bookseller everyone keeps calling her boyfriend. Evidence stacks up, but a killer is overdue to strike again. With lives and her library on the line, Cleo must shift into high gear to close the book on murder in Better Off Read, the charming Bookmobile series debut by Nora Page.