The Bad Book Affair: A Hilarious Irish Bibliomystery – The Fourth Mobile Library Mystery Featuring Israel Armstrong (The Mobile Library Mystery Series, 4) - Softcover

Sansom, Ian

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0061452017 ISBN 13: 9780061452017

Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks, 2010

Synopsis

“[Israel’s] fish-out-of-water dilemmas and encounters with kooky locals will resonate with Alexander McCall Smith fans.” —Publishers Weekly

 

Author Ian Sansom “clearly loves a good laugh” (Washington Post), as his delightful mystery series featuring rumpled, fish-out-of-water, Jewish vegetarian librarian Israel Armstrong indisputably proves. The Bad Book Affair is Israel’s fourth hilarious adventure as he tools around Ireland in a rattletrap bookmobile trying to solve the mystery of a missing teenage girl while trying to keep his mess of a personal life in order. Sansom’s Mobile Library Mystery series has made a big splash with critics on both sides of “the Pond.” The New York Times Book Review loves their “formidable reserves of insight and humor,” while the London Times calls Israel “one of the most original and exciting amateur sleuths around.”

About this title

About the Author

Ian Sansom is the author of 10 books of fiction and non-fiction. He is a former Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge and a former Writer-in-Residence at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry in Belfast. He is currently a Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. He is a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio 4 and Radio 3 and he writes for The Guardian and The London Review of Books.

From the Back Cover

Israel Armstrong—the hapless duffle coat wearing, navel-gazing librarian who solves crimes and domestic problems whilst driving a mobile library around the north coast of Ireland—finds himself on the brink of thirty. But any celebration, planned or otherwise, must be put on hold when a troubled teenager—the daughter of a local politician—mysteriously vanishes. Israel suspects the girl's disappearance has something to do with his lending her American Pastoral from the library's special "Unshelved" category. Now he has to find the lost teen before he's run out of town—while he attempts to recover from his recent breakup with his girlfriend, Gloria, and tries to figure out where in Tumdrum a Jewish vegetarian might celebrate his thirtieth birthday.

Reviews

In Sansom's satiric fourth mobile library mystery (after 2008's The Book Stops Here), Israel Armstrong, an English Jewish vegetarian mobile librarian and amateur sleuth, embarks on yet another bumblingly endearing case in Tumdrum, on the northernmost coast of the north of the north of Northern Ireland. The day after Israel allows 14-year-old Lyndsay Morris to borrow a bad book (i.e., Philip Roth's American Pastoral), Lyndsay, daughter of prominent Unionist candidate Maurice Morris, disappears. The coincidence is enough to make Israel suspect in the eyes of his boss, Linda Wei, a lesbian Chinese single mother, as well as the police and a nosy newspaper reporter. Never mind the thin plot and minimal detection. Sansom uses the naïve Israel to poke fun at politics, religion, prejudice, and pretensions of all sorts. Readers will particularly enjoy the passages devoted to the efforts to keep books like American Pastoral out of the hands of the young and impressionable. (Jan.)
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*Starred Review* Israel Armstrong, the English, Jewish, vegetarian mobile librarian, is back for his fourth despondent slog (after The Book Stops Here, 2008) through the north of Northern Ireland. He’s as out of his element as ever—he’d hoped for a brownstone in Brooklyn and breakfast with Paul Auster—and the mystery is as incidental to the craic as ever, too. This time, Israel’s lending of a book from “The Unshelved,” a selection of under-the-counter books that includes both Philip Roth’s American Pastoral and Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, makes him a suspect in the disappearance of the borrower, the daughter of a redemption-seeking political candidate. A reluctant Israel investigates only to clear his name, with colleague and comic foil Ted Carson—the two are surely one of the genre’s great comedy teams—doing the driving. But what’s different this time is that Israel’s ongoing existential crisis, while played for laughs, isn’t only played for laughs. The death of a dear friend forces Israel into meaningful introspection, and Sansom offers genuinely affecting scenes of aging, death, and grief that make his still-generous humor all the more sweet. Though this series hasn’t always lived up to its terrific potential, The Bad Book Affair augurs very well for the future. --Keir Graff

Edition details

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0061452017
• ISBN 13: 9780061452017
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 348