What do You think about The Burglar In The Library (2007)?
After his girlfriend announces she's getting married to another man, Bernie takes off to an English Style country house with Carolyn to lick his wounds in searching for a Raymond Chandler book rumoured to be personally inscribed to Dashell Hammett.It's the winter, in the middle of nowhere, and the snow is coming in thick and fast. The last thing anyone needs is to realise they are trapped with no chance of escape with a killer on the loose.Medium length book (most of Block's books come in at under 300 pages, this is just over), and it has all the usual witty conversations and one liners between Bernie and Carolyn. Some of the secondary characters were not particularly 3 Dimensional - only one of the murder victims actually got to say anything, but do you really ever talk to everyone when on holiday?There is a precocious child, and I have a vague feeling that this has been used before as a technique in a previous book, but I could be mistaken.Anyway, once again, a Rhoddenbarr book that I enjoyed.
—Sorcha
I have recently been burying myself in detective/mystery classics. In the last month, I've read Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, and Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None and Murder on the Orient Express. So when I got wind that Block, a writer whose work I enjoy, wrote a book where his burglar protagonist, Bernie Rhodenbarr, attempts to steal a first-edition copy of The Big Sleep inscribed to Dashiell Hammett, only to get caught up in an Agatha Christie type murder-mystery in an English country house during a blizzard, I couldn't pass it up. Even Rhodenbarr's cat is a literary allusion -- named after E.W. Hornung's gentleman thief A.J. Raffles. But I digress.This story is, despite the murders, a light read that delights in hanging lampshades on many detective/mystery tropes. While the pace dragged a tiny bit in the middle, and the story jarred me with a switch from first to third-person at one point, it was, overall, a very fun, enjoyable read I would definitely recommend to mystery fans familiar with the above classics.
—Eric
"The Burglar in the Library" is an enjoyable Bernie Rhodenbarr mystery.This is the second time I've read the story and it has remained enjoyable and entertaining.Bernie and his companion, Caroline Kaiser, leave New York City and travel upstate New York to a traditional English country house that has been converted to a B & B.Bernie is a book store owner in New York and knows his mystery writers. He has found that Raymond Chandler, one of the founders of the hard-boiled mystery will be at a friend's home in Connecticut in 1941. Also at the home will be Dashiell Hammett. While together Chandler personalizes a copy of his novel, "The Big Sleep" to Dashiell.Bernie thinks that the country house he's going to was the same place where Hammett and Chandler were. If that book was left in the library, it would be worth big money.When they get to the Cuttfield House a severe snowstorm is blowing. Eventually, the house is cut off, and someone cuts the electricity, then the fun begins, someone begins killing the people at the House.As a mystery fan myself, it was so much fun to hear about Ed McBain, Agatha Christie as well as Chandler and Hammett as characters in a story.The pace of the story is finely tuned and the book provides constant enjoyment. It's just what that doctor ordered for a patient wanting a good read.
—Michael
