We have here a rather standard locked-room mystery, with some possibly innovative and perhaps tantalizing twists. Read this article for free: Already have an account? To continue reading, please subscribe: * We have here a rather standard locked-room mystery, with some possibly innovative and perhaps tantalizing twists. Read unlimited articles for free today: Already have an account? We have here a rather standard locked-room mystery, with some possibly innovative and perhaps tantalizing twists.
Swap out your creepy mansion, wayward cruise ship or lonely overnight train and swap in a rare book library after-hours. Swap out your middle-aged, wealthy, snooty, oblivious, condescending coterie and swap in a roster of smart, confident, go-getter, self-possessed Gen-Z types. Swap out your preternaturally brilliant detective and his fawning, narratively-inclined companion for variegated point-of-view chapters and no investigating centre of gravity.
Good. But somewhere along the line, realize the price paid — handing over an ultimately enviable but so comfortable and so comforting setting, as well as chucking the very idea of fundamental differences of character — simply doesn’t return enough reward. Alice Xue photo Eva Jurczyk worked for the University of Toronto library system before publishing bookish mysteries.
They do say one ought to write about what one knows best, and Eva Jurczyk has already begun to dine out on that. A book-buyer for the splendid University of Toronto library system, Jurczyk poached her own biography to craft her debut novel, 2022’s . It largely defeated its clunky title and delivered some lively goods with a puzzle orbiting not the appearance of a sudden corpse, but the disappearance of a cherished tome.
It worked. is not its sequel, but shares a similar setting. We are here in some kind of semi-posh Vermont post-secondary educational institution, and we have a half-dozen students about to complete their graduate studies in its august library.
They’ve managed to brew a celebratory night of intellectual debauchery behind the closed doors of their beloved work/study space on what is effectively their last day on campus. Their academic supervisor is a predictably dotty but charming elderly man who seems poised to become a main character (and maybe even the culprit!), but he never really secures his spot on stage. No.
, it’ll just be our young group, on their own, after dark, in the library. These nigh-credentialed students can’t simply get drunk in the stacks — they have to raise the bar and stage a re-enactment of the ancient Eleusinian Mysteries. That is, they intend on reproducing their own version of the rites of the supreme agricultural Greek goddess, Demeter, and her annual mourning for her beloved daughter, Persephone, abducted by nasty Hades.
Getting over-the-top, you think? How about adding in that these young scholars decide this is not only something they ought to attempt on a 24-hour-pregame-fast empty stomach, but it is also the right moment to drop acid (most for the first time). It’s a lot. This all takes dozens of pages to explain and set up, but by page 80 there is, thankfully, a body, and we are off on our collective descent.
It’s dark. There are books — endless, teetering shelves of them. There’s loads of blood.
There’s an apparent couple that isn’t a couple, a shy girl just trying to fit in, love explicit and implicit, fermenting academic rivalry. There’s guilt and blame here, there and everywhere. And there’s that blood.
Tacky, damaging blood getting all over spiffy collegiate clothes and irreplaceably rare books. That Night in the Library The pace is undeniably breathless and the setting very nearly saves the whole package, but it becomes difficult to distinguish the various Zoomers, and there is a sufficiently hefty number of plot holes that one tires of granting hall passes. The fairly fresh resolution will satisfy many, but will unsettle those who know the 2022 film or who have read Umberto Eco’s glorious (1980) or seen Jean-Jacques Annaud’s magnificent film of that beauty (1986).
All in all, is a somewhat-inspired but ultimately routine mystery that wants to be on screen — and may well be some day. There’s likely enough pretty books, and surely enough sticky blood, to sell. Laurence Broadhurst teaches English and religion at St.
Paul’s High School in Winnipeg. Eva Jurczyk Sourcebooks, 288 pages, $27 Advertisement Advertisement.
