The Broken Spine

The premise of throwing away all the books was far fetched, but the author worked that out well. I still can't completely buy the library without books concept, but maybe there is room for improvement in future books.
There are several compelling characters and I think that might be a better part of the book than the mystery. Tru, Charlie, Tori, and the detective all have more layers to their character than I expected.
This wasn't my favorite, but I will probably read another one in the series.

The Broken Spine is the start of a new cozy mystery series featuring librarian Trudell Beckett. The leaders of Tru's small Southern town have decided to turn the library bookless and replace everything with computers and tablets to bring the town into the future. All of the library's print books are destined for the landfill. Tru is in the middle of an illicit book rescue operation when she discovers the body of the man responsible for the “bookless library” project, which immediately makes Tru seem to be the obvious suspect. She has to work with her friends to solve the mystery in order to clear her own name.

This book is a decent cozy mystery with some fun characters. At times the Southern-ness felt a little over the top, but I admit I don't have firsthand experience of living in small town in the South. As a librarian myself, the library focus probably made me like the story a bit more than I would have otherwise.

It’s hard to find a good mystery series and I wanted to like this more then I did. There are good parts to the book but there is too much disappointment for me to really like it.

The author doesn’t seem to know how collector books work. Library books are used so much that the books will be well worn and have tag/stickers on them for cataloguing. This alone makes the driving force for the murder useless. It’s really not hard to guess who the murder was which makes all the main characters guessing near the end annoying.

The characters aren’t bad but the main character is a terrible friend. She immediately suspects her friend and her friend’s new boyfriend. She also doesn’t seem to care what is going on with anyone but her self. The love interest did something horrible to the MC in high school but the MC still can’t help but be week around them. Meeting again the love interest doesn’t even remember the MC and there is no apology.

I don’t think I can continue with this series. It had good parts and most of the characters are likable. Loved the cat. Its not a bad book but just not for me.