Liesl Weiss is called back to the library where she works early in her year’s sabbatical. She had taken a year off to write a book about ancient landscaping practices, but the library needed her. The director of the university library has had a stroke, and his latest acquisition hasn’t even been insured yet, and the university president is wanting to show it off to the donors.
Liesl believes the acquisition, a six-volume Plantin Polyglot Bible, is in the safe. But her boss had just changed the combination to the safe, and he hadn’t told her the new combination before he fell into a coma. But Liesl is smart enough to know that she couldn’t tell the university president that, so she defers and deflects until she can get her hands on the Bible. But when the director’s wife shows up at his office with the new combination for Liesl, she is met with worse news—the safe is empty.
Liesl wants to go to the police, but she is discouraged by most everyone from the university. The president and her coworkers in the library tell her not to report the missing books, despite their half-a-million-dollar price. They’re worried about embarrassing the university and the library in front of their colleagues, and (more importantly, at least to the president) to the donors.
There is the possibility that the Plantin was just shelved somewhere by accident, so Liesl starts looking through the stacks, one shelf at a time, to try to find them. But the more she looks, the more she is convinced that the volumes are not in the library. They were stolen.
So when the quiet librarian Miriam stops showing up for work, Liesl is concerned. There have been no calls from her and Liesl’s calls go unanswered. Finally, her conscience can hold out no longer and she calls the police. She tells the detective about the missing books, in case that helps the police find her. But the police can’t investigate the missing books, as there is no official report of a crime on it, and there won’t be unless the university president goes to them about it.
As the school semester ebbs away, Liesl has to face the idea that one of her colleagues has taken the books. But who? Francis, the ex-spy and the man Liesl had an affair with decades ago? Or Max, the former priest who had to give up his collar when he’s been caught stealing money from the church? Or was it awkward Miriam, who had been getting increasingly distant from her colleagues and has since gone missing? Liesl is the one who has to figure out what’s been happening in the library, or she could lose everything she’s worked so hard for her entire career.
The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections is a unique mystery, smart and moving, part chilling whodunnit and part women’s fiction about a woman trying to figure out who she is now that her depressed husband is better and their daughter is in college. Her quiet year of sabbatical writing a book is thrown into chaos, and she has to figure out how to leave the library in good shape before she heads into retirement.
If you’re expecting this to be a book about bespectacled librarians in buns and tired suits from decades past, shushing library patrons over half-glasses and offering stern looks to anyone who might dog-ear a page in a book, then you are in the wrong library. These characters are real and uncertain, quick with the wine and slow to call the police. They spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in the blink of an eye and worry more about their reputation with the university donors over a thief being in their midst.
Now, if you read that and think that I was disappointed in this book, please hear me when I say that this book is amazing. It’s just unexpected, and that makes it a great choice for a book club or to read with a friend. The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections brings up a lot of feels and thoughts, and you’ll want to have someone to talk to them about, probably over a glass or two of wine. And that will just make the book twice as fun.
Egalleys for The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections were provided by Poisoned Pen Press through NetGalley, with many thanks.
