The Book Stops Here, by Ian Sansom

Very funny Mobile Librarian mystery from Ian Sansom. Israel Armstrong and his librarian colleage Ted are sent to England to attend a conference, which goes unspeakably awry. I really like this series.

Side note: 1000th post! woot.

The Bad Book Affair, by Ian Sansom

Very funny mystery, starring the truly unusual character of Israel Armstrong, an English Jewish vegetarian librarian who, for reasons that baffle even him, is working a mobile library service in Northern Ireland. This is the second of the series that I have read, and I enjoyed this one even more than the first, which I found hilarious. Literate and oddly told, this would go nicely with The Broken Teaglass, for readers who like their mysteries less bloody and more wordy.

The Case of the Missing Books, by Ian Sansom

This feels almost ridiculously meta, but here it is.

I'm a librarian who likes to read mysteries, writing about a book about a librarian who likes to read mysteries whose work as a librarian is interrupted by the disappearance of an entire library's collection of books.

As wildly geeky as it sounds, this was fun, funny, and really different a mystery.

Israel Armstrong made such a nice change in protagonists, (geeky out-of-shape career-challenged male), and it's rare (for me at least) to read a laugh-out-loud book set in Northern Ireland, and England the minister was a dream of a character, with his brothers Scotland and Wales.

Great fun.