Would You Turn Your Back on this Librarian?

How Can I Help You - Laura Sims

Call me old-fashioned if you like, but the style of entertainment that includes television shows like “Dexter” and “Breaking Bad,” content built around deeply flawed protagonists, just leaves me cold. In the same vein, I’m perfectly happy to say that if I don’t like the characters in a book, it’s a pretty safe bet I won’t like the book. That’s the reason Laura Sims’ How Can I Help You just didn’t click with me at first: I wouldn’t turn my back on either of the protagonists.

There’s Margo, who used to be Jane, a librarian who used to be a nurse, living in a small midwestern town instead of the Northeast (where authorities are still looking for her). Jane was a wonderful nurse who helped a lot of people… into eternity, we gather. And then there’s Patricia, the bored research librarian who’d rather be writing the great American novel than cooling her heels in some downstate farm town. To that end, she has a half-written novel stashed in a drawer.

Margo’s well-ordered life hits the skids, however, when Patricia shows up in her library to fill the long-vacant research librarian slot; skids greased by the unexpected death of a patron in Margo’s arms. Watching the life leave the woman’s body awakens a longing in the one-time angel of mercy; an awakening to which the new hire is an unwitting witness. After that event, Patricia finds herself fascinated by her coworker, so much so that she discards her unfinished novel in favor of a character study of the unnamed “M.”

Thus begins a cat-and-mouse game as the two women maneuver cautiously around each other. Patricia spends her days plotting a new novel featuring “M” even as Margo sheds her librarian persona and reverts to Jane under her watchful eye. It’s only a matter of time…

In her first novel, Looker, Sims developed a reputation for writing female characters with outsized egos and questionable character. Margo, especially, fits that bill (Charles Cullen, anyone?); but Patricia, too, has her moments. Though slow-paced, as perhaps befits a novel about librarians, How Can I Help You still manages a thrill or two and even a surprising twist.

I guess I liked it after all. But I still wouldn't want to meet either Margo or Patricia in a dark alley...

copyright © 2023 scmrak

I received an advance reader copy of How Can I Help You in exchange for my honest review.