Librarian Sherry Pinkwhistle has a knack for solving murders – lots of them. Sometimes she’s concerned by just how many killers she’s had to track down in her quiet village, though none of her neighbours seem surprised by the rising body count…
But when someone close to Sherry ends up dead, and her cat becomes unexpectedly possessed by an ancient demon as irritating as it is infernal, Sherry decides that it’s time for action.
It will be a lesson for murderers and demons alike:
Never mess with a librarian.

IN A NUTSHELL
This wasn’t the cosy scooby-doo meets ‘Murder She Wrote’ that the cover and the title led me to expect.
It was clever, complex and focused not on a demon-hunting society but on Sherry’s struggle to find out why so many people in her small town are murdered and why she, the village librarian, is always the one who works out who killed them.
Sherry was well-drawn and relatable. Her friends were fun. The demons were a little disappointing,
The mysteries were entertaining. I loved the central conceit of the story. The ending was satisfying but for me, the pacing in the middle of the book was a little slow.

Sometimes, when I’m reading cosy mysteries, I’m aware that part of what makes them cosy is that people are nicer than I am. Sherry Pinkwhistle, the librarian at the heart of this story, wasn’t nicer than me. She was someone I could relate to and believe in. She’s more like Jane Marple than Jessica Fletcher. Her thoughts about herself at the start of the book made me smile and want to know her better:

“she could watch someone crying or laughing or rocking back and forth in a corner and feel curiosity instead of either suspicion or sympathy.”

“She spent so much time pretending to be a nice old lady from a book that her actual, somewhat strange and ghoulish personality tended to take her by surprise.”

 The first 40% of the book carried me along quite happily. I was enjoying Sherry and I was amused by her misfit gang of allies. As I watched Sherry solve a murder, it was obvious that something bigger was going on. The mystery worked but the murder felt… staged. That was intriguing but not entirely satisfying. I knew this was a cozy supernatural mystery but I had expected a little more tension. This had all the threat of playing a game of Cluedo

Sherry’s first unambiguous encounter with the supernatural was underwhelming. Instead of cranking up the tension and moving the story forward, it felt like an arms-length experience and it slowed everything down. I couldn’t see the point of having two demons: a minion demon who presents as Lord Thomas Cromwell (Why? What does he have to do with a small town in upstate New York?) and the big bad that he’s working for who doesn’t manifest until much later The Lord Thomas Cromwell demon didn’t work for me. He wasn’t interesting and he kept the supernatural threat at a distance.

The action in the middle of the book was slow. The Village Library Demon-hunting Society members barely featured in the story. The focus was on Sherry, who was being plagued by a demon and her own guilt. At that point in the story I wasn’t being pulled along by the plot but by Sherry’s dry wit.

As I entered the last third of the book, the plot started to take on a new and surprising shape but there still wasn’t much tension. The demon element gave the murder investigations an odd spin – making them more abstract – the puzzle being not who killed whom and why but figuring out what the demon got out of it.

Then, in the last fifth of the book, everything came together very quickly and in quite a satisfying way. The big bad was front and centre. Sherry had finally worked out what was going on (but not what to do about it), the plot came into focus and the threat level finally rose. I liked that the ending was clever and that it moved Sherry forward personally.