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��Something’s wrong in the air, you know, when a book costs less than a bullet. Or a Coke. Values-wise.��

I'm not quite sure of this one. I was lured in by the title, the cover, by the promise of a melancholic mystery set in between endless rows of books; of hidden code messages in cut-out books; and of course by the society of the BookFrogs, sad existences finding comfort and solace in the company of books.

But, in reality, all those things didn't amount to much. The wonderfully bookish surroundings surely provide the setting of the book, but it remains a setting, and the true power of books and literature is never really touched upon.
Instead, everything turns out to have roots in a horrible trauma, suffered by the main character as a child. A brutal and seemingly meaningless mass murder binds all the characters together in a tragic family drama that has nothing to do with books �� and everything to do with jealousy, rage and hushed love affairs.

��Libraries were havens for everyone.��

I'm not a very experienced reader of murder mysteries or crime fiction. And I'm not even sure this book really can strictly be categorized as such. Even so, the mystery seemed a bit weak to me; the solution is almost grasped out of thin air, leaving no room for the reader to figure out what happened and why.

While the characters are "wonderfully eccentric" as the synopsis claims, they aren't much else. They seem paper thin and hard to symphatize with. For instance, when the main characters confronts her boyfriend, of several years, with a terribly discovery he has made about her past, the only thing he has to say, is that he "isn't angry because she didn't tell him". Is that really a believable response for when your loved one tells you one of the darkest and most traumatic secrets of her past?

Overall, while this book was easy and at times even nerve wracking, it ultimately fell flat. I liked the synopsis more than I liked the actual book itself.