I will admit right off the bat that my tastes are a little – odd? What I like isn’t necessarily what other people will like, and what I find funny sometimes causes other people to look at me oddly and start inching away.
With that in mind, I have to confess that I had great fun reading How Can I Help You, by Laura Sims, a book that checks a lot of my preferences at once: it’s about a serial killer who’s hiding out with a new identity as a library assistant, and her relationship with the new reference librarian who has a pretty good idea of who she is and what she’s done in the past. It’s incredibly dark, it’s funny (in an incredibly dark way), and clearly, VERY clearly, the author has worked in a library and knows what it’s like.
Back in the day, Margo was Jane. Jane was a nurse who killed a number of people at a number of different hospitals until she almost got caught and had to high-tail it out of her latest hospital and recreate herself. She chose the persona of Margo, a middle aged, jolly, extremely competent library assistant, and found a job in a small town library, where she’s been working happily for the last two years. She hasn’t killed anyone or even come close. She’s a model library employee.
Enter Patricia, a failed writer who, in despair over her multiply-rejected novel, has given up on writing and settled on a job as a librarian in the very library where Margo works. Naturally, Patricia has no more idea than anyone else in the library about Margo’s background, but once we have the two of them in the same building, things start to change.
After an incident with a particularly obnoxious patron (the kind who’s lost 44 books and who insists she dropped them off and it’s the library’s fault they’re missing, the kind who then rants about how, as a taxpayer, she’s paying the library staff’s salaries), Margo loses it. And then, lo and behold, that obnoxious patron is found dead in the public bathroom. Margo “finds” her, and Patricia discovers Margo there.
Patricia figures out who Margo was, but, instead of doing what an upstanding citizen should do and turning her in to the police, Patricia discovers that the Margo/Jane story has fired her imagination and now she’s writing again, the words flowing beautifully.
You might call this a game of cat and mouse, but Margo is far from a mouse, and if Patricia were a cat, she would be a cat who’s following the mouse around, trying to figure out what’s going on in the mouse’s head, rather than trying to kill the mouse. The situation is brilliantly set up, the suspense is masterful, and the book is a page-turner.
Along the way, we get hints of Margo’s past, including a particularly chilling hint about her childhood (she got started early), and a few judiciously chosen details about her activities in the hospitals where she worked. We also get some background of Patricia’s, but frankly she’s not as interesting as Margo, and what keeps us reading her story is the ongoing question of what she’s going to do about what she knows.
It might be that this would not be as entertaining to someone who doesn’t work in a library, but for those of us with an intimate knowledge of how things work, all the details are perfect, from the layout of the place to the kinds of questions Patricia fields as a reference librarian, to the other staff members and the director, to the patrons and their relationships with the main characters.
The story is told alternately from Margo’s and Patricia’s viewpoints, and you find yourself seeing the same incident from two different perspectives, which is far from being repetitive. In fact, I found myself reading Margo’s version of events and eagerly anticipating the spin Patricia would put on them, and vice versa.
I did think Patricia figured Margo out a little more quickly than seemed entirely likely, and the police involvement in the plot was a bit questionable (did they suspect Margo or not? The author doesn’t seem to have made up her mind), but these are small nit-picks in an overall wild and absorbing book.
This is the kind of book where you find yourself rooting for deeply morally compromised people. I, a fan of the early Dexter books, am accustomed to being in this position, but it is something to keep in mind, especially if you feel uncomfortable rooting for the bad guys.
The ending, by which I often judge books, is just right. I won’t spoil it by telling you more, just that even though I didn’t anticipate its ending this way, I found it very satisfying.
So check out How Can I Help You for a twisted look at library life.
Oh, and just to set the record straight, of COURSE I would never behave the way Margo does. I love my library. Seriously.
Bookskill 