Beth Gutcheon is the acclaimed author of Still Missing, More Than You Know, and Gossip. Her latest work, Death at Breakfast, celebrates its book birthday today. The first entry in a smart and stylish new mystery series, Death at Breakfast features a pair of unlikely investigators in a retired private school head and her high society friend whose trip to a scenic Maine resort takes a quick turn when another guest, the father of the latest teen pop icon, turns up dead. Be sure to pick up a copy here or request one from your local library. In the meantime, Beth has joined us today to share some library love.
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Libraries have always been a haven and a joy to me. When I was a child, the library in the village in Maine where I’ve lived off and on had the best collection of Oz books ever seen. Having already read (I thought) everything Frank Baum had ever written for children, when I found The Magical Monarch of Mo there it was like turning a corner into what you know to be a cul-de-sac and suddenly finding the road open and winding off across sunlit fields. The library had a fire going on crisp summer mornings or wet afternoons, and reading there, semi-hidden for hours, was a deep pleasure that still comes back to me with the scent of balsam or of woodsmoke.
That same library, enlarged and updated but somehow retaining its original flavor, is now often described as the living room of the town. I had my first summer job there, mending hurt books and womaning the circulation desk during Mrs. Parker’s lunch hour when I was sixteen. In the late 90’s, when I was living year round in the next village over, before the internet had become the research engine it is now, Fern McTighe, the librarian on the reference desk, was my everything. When I needed to know whether, for instance, a teenager would have been described as “grounded” in that village in the thirties, I went straight to her. Since Fern had been a teenager there in the thirties she knew the answer, plus found the citation in about two seconds flat: “grounded” was aeronautical, and wasn’t in common use until WWII. She also produced a class B miracle when I needed to know if such and such a word meant what I thought it did in colloquial Swedish. Fern disappeared and came back with a volunteer from the circulation desk who asked me, in Swedish, if she could help me. (She could. The word that seemed from the dictionary like a good Scandinavian name for a summer house actually meant “youth hostel.”)
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A Special LLF Guest Post / Book Birthday Combo: Beth Gutcheon, author of DEATH AT BREAKFASTRead More »
At long last, Brighton is here! The LLF team has been lucky enough to witness this incredible thriller—one of the year's best—blossom from a manuscript brimming with promise to a critically acclaimed powerhouse of a novel. And boy we can't wait to see it on library and store shelves!
