{"id":40399,"date":"2022-02-25T09:22:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-25T15:22:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/?p=40399"},"modified":"2023-11-15T01:53:32","modified_gmt":"2023-11-15T07:53:32","slug":"dorothy-st-james-beloved-bookroom-mystery-series","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/dorothy-st-james-beloved-bookroom-mystery-series\/","title":{"rendered":"Dorothy St. James: Beloved Bookroom Mystery Series"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a> As part of the long-ongoing series where I look at the most popular and recommended Cozy mystery series<\/a> put forward by site readers, I’m once again moving into unfamiliar territory – at least by series – with the Dorothy St. James<\/a> <\/strong>title, The Broken Spine<\/em><\/a>. I specify unfamiliar with the series because I have read books by Dorothy St. James before, but nothing in this, the Beloved Bookroom Mystery Series<\/strong>, which only started last year in 2021. That definitely puts this in the running as one of the most recent series that I’ve read for this series.<\/p>\n

As is likely obvious from the title of both series and book, this is one of the more popular topics in Cozy fiction – books about books – very “meta”. Trudell Becket (sometimes “Tru” to her friends), the librarian of a library in the town of Cypress, South Carolina, is campaigning against the conversion of the library to a “bookless” library, one that focuses primarily on the lending of electronic books. When the books are finally all scheduled to be removed and dumped in a landfill, Trudell and a group of friends break into the library at night, determined to save at least some of the books from destruction by housing them in a now-abandoned bomb shelter built in World War II under the library.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, while moving books down into the basement, Trudell and her friends are surprised by the sound of a crash, which Trudell quickly determines came from a shelf of DVDs falling onto the town manager – the very person who had led the campaign to move the library to a bookless format. Naturally, Trudell is a leading candidate for the murder – not only was she vocally opposed to the transition, she was also in the library at the time of the death. Also naturally, she also has a somewhat complicated relationship with one of the local detectives, a former high school classmate of hers, though in this case he is the one who has recently returned to the town.<\/p>\n

There’s definitely an obvious irony in the method of how I read this particular book – on my Kindle, taking advantage of the variable type size. My eyes aren’t what they once were, and while I was initially skeptical of moving to an electronic format, the option of having several hundred books in a single package lighter than a paperback and lit for easy bedroom reading has definitely made the transition smoother. That said, I personally don’t think that the electronic format should fully replace the printed word, and certainly still appreciate the charm of actual paper books – there’s a certain physicality to them that isn’t possible for Kindles, and I still find browsing through pages for a detail I want to recall easier than working backwards through a Kindle. So I can see both sides of the paper vs. electronic argument.<\/p>\n

I really enjoyed reading this book. Being a Cozy about books and book lovers, it certainly covers a lot of old ground, but it also discusses newer issues like electronic books – though admittedly in an often obviously biased way.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re interested in seeing other most recommended or popular Cozy Mystery authors\/series, please visit the\u00a0Most Popular & Recommended Cozy Mystery Series page<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0on my site.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As part of the long-ongoing series where I look at the most popular and recommended Cozy mystery series put forward by site readers, I’m once again moving into unfamiliar territory – at least by series – with the Dorothy St. James title, The Broken Spine. I specify unfamiliar with the series because I have read […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6,9,58],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-40399","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-authors","7":"category-books","8":"category-most-popular-and-recommended-mystery-series","9":"entry","10":"override"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pI0sr-avB","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40399"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41766,"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40399\/revisions\/41766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cozy-mystery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}