A Death Long Overdue: A Lighthouse Library Mystery

Librarian Lucy Richardson is organizing a fortieth-year college reunion for Bertie James, the library director, to be held at the Bodie Island Lighthouse Library on the Outer Banks. Among the guests is the not-well-liked Helena Sanchez, Bertie’s predecessor. After the evening event, the guests, mostly ladies, wander down to the beach and walk out on the pier. It’s dark, people lose contact, and Helena ends up dead in the water, a knife wound to the back of her head. Two items, a letter opener thought to be the murder weapon, and a two-decade-old library card, are missing from the exhibit prepared especially for the reunion. Lucy, not one to ignore an on-her-doorstep mystery, follows up with the guests, each a suspect, innocently chatting with them in hopes of picking up whatever clues she can about Helena’s past and the whereabouts of each lady on the night of the murder. The mystery, though, is complicated by the theft twenty years earlier of the priceless Rajipani Diamond, a local family treasure, and its possible connection to the removed library card. A Death Long Overdue is a well written, cleverly plotted, leisurely paced tale that readers of cozy mysteries will find to their liking.