Checked Out

Checked Out, by Elaine Viets, 288 pages

Helen Hawthorne is a Private Investigator who has been hired to investigate the loss of a million dollar painting inside a library book by going undercover as a library volunteer.  Once in place, she gets embroiled in a mystery concerning a potential ghost and a very real murder.  Fans of libraries, cozy-ish mysteries, sort of arbitrary endings, characters with little personality, outdated librarian stereotypes, or that thing where the author lists at the end what happened to all of the characters without actually working it into any sort of chapter, may like this book.