Synopsis "Murder in the Library: A Starfire Mystery"
Judge Willard Stevens has been murdered in the Hillville Iowa Public Library! It is a new scandal that electrifies everybody in town! A thrilling act of this kind seems to be what everybody has been needing to get their blood running faster. No one cares about the crooked Justice; his death seems to be a righteous judgement for his many sins, but to have him executed with a knife in the sacred halls of the kindly old Library is a blow that nobody expects. The Starfire men, always ready to give a hand to the bumbling sheriff of Bogger County, are on the scene as soon as they get the call, and the tussle between Sheriff Baylor and the Detective Agency begins anew. Lillian Stevens, the Judge's often pitied wife, is over in Atlantic visiting her mother when he is killed, and Atlantic is only an hour's drive away. That brings up a lot of questions, of course, but everybody knows that a gentle person like Lilly couldn't possibly be guilty of such a heinous act. Perhaps subtle poison, but not a knife in the back! Bessie Corcoran, who stumbles across the body, quite literally, is known in town as a friendly woman who really likes men, including Willard Stevens, with whom she now stands accused of a prolonged affair. Guy LaFevre, the head of murder investigations for the Starfire Agency, believes that Bess is a woman who has something to hide. She is, he thinks, counterfeit in some way. Reena Hoffenstot, the steely-cold Librarian, is not a woman you want to cross, nor is the Queen of Local Gossip, Betsy Thandry, who spreads her wild tales as far and wide as she possibly can, although most of the women who have listened to her in the past are no longer very interested in what she has to say. Hillville is a wonderful mix of every kind of intrigue and insanity, as well as the wholesome and gentle folk who inhabit most of the quietly white houses along the well-kept streets. It is something of an enigma that so much of the ills of humanity boils to the surface every once in a while, but, of course, that is small-town life in the 1950's, and that is exactly why Hillville is the wonderful, even at times exotic, place that it is.
