Brand-new librarian Meg Booker is just supposed to be checking out books. Instead, it’s the patrons who are being checked out—permanently.

Fir Grove Library, Portland, Oregon, April 1985: Big hair. Leggings. Card catalogs. Kicking kids with giant boom boxes out of the library. Meg’s got it all handled—until her boss takes off on a way-too-long vacation and leaves her in charge.

Right away, things start going wrong. Historical records disappear out of the archives. The hot new library page skateboards into work—or doesn’t—whenever he feels like it. A simmering feud boils over between two prominent and universally loathed patrons—nicknamed “The Witch” and “Leisure Suit Lothario”—leaving Meg scrambling to keep the peace.

Then the Witch turns up dead in the library conference room. The police say it’s natural causes, but Meg suspects murder—and no librarian worth her reference desk credentials leaves a reference question unanswered. Enlisting the aid of the library’s mystery book club, and armed with mad research skills, she sets out to prove what really happened.

But when there’s another death—and one of her friends is arrested –Meg has to unmask the real murderer before it’s too late.

A Shush Before Dying is the first book of the Meg Booker Librarian Mysteries—a cozy library mystery series set in the 1980s.