I really, really dislike this character Jacqueline the librarian, and am shocked by it, because I enjoy Peters' other two series very much, especially Vicky Bliss. Maybe it's the third person narrative that keeps the reader more an audience than inside the characters head along for the ride. The character has a lot of Amelia Peabody if she were a late 20th-century divorcee with no binding attachments, but it is that lack of binding attachments and a family of characters that allow you to see into the deeper loyalties and emotions of the character that make Amelia Peabody lovable, rather than arrogant and cold. Jacqueline, like Amelia, expresses certainties about her own character that her actions belie, i.e., that she does care about people and their troubles, but she is a woman set loose in mid-life from the duties of motherhood and she is only serving her own whims. I simply can't find the heart of the woman, and her shenanigans verge on the cruel at times. The mystery is an English country-house Agatha Christie set-up. It is okay, but disliking the main character made it hard to pay attention to whether it was a good mystery or not.