This is the fourth in the Moblie Library Mystery series and while this isn't my favorite I still found it entertaining. This series features a very quirky main character, an English Jewish vegetarian mobile librarian in Northern Ireland who keeps finding himself involved in rather unusual circumstances. In this case, he lends a book from the mobile library (a Philip Roth) to a 14 year old girl who disappears a short time later. The plot is rather thin but it provides the reader with some laughs and gives Sansom the opportunity to feature a serious topic, the efforts to restrict the availability of certain books to the "impressionable". ( )

"I can see the merit in the writing, but I didn't like it much. My reasons are purely subjective: Israel got on my nerves, as did Ted. I liked both at first, but too much of a good thing is annoying. Cloying. Unsympathetic. I don't care how depressed Israel is, a librarian should be able to string together a complete sentence at least once in a book. Ted's gruffness and selective deafness never ended up revealing anything deeper and his conversational circles started off fun and amusing but soon became just tiresome.

There's a whole bookmobile full of expository writing here, and it's so well done, but again, there's soooo much of it. Halfway through the book I found myself skipping large swathes of it because, enough already.

Lastly, there's really no mystery plot here at all. Zip. It might be the most anticlimactic 'mystery' I've ever read.

I might have missed something - some character building or world building that would have made the story more compelling; this is the first book I've read in the series, and it's the 5th, I think; in between finishing the book and writing this review, I had to drop off books for a library sale, and my copy went into a box. I wouldn't steer anyone away from reading it - the writing is good, the characters quirky, the setting Irish. But it was sadly not my jam." ( )

2 stars because it was well written and the author obviously well read but Israel Amstrong needs to take it his SSRI and the long descriptive passage were unengaging. ( )

The protagonist, Israel Armstrong, is a very likeable character, harmless, except maybe to himself. There is plenty of local humour some of which may be a bit too close to the truth for comfort. Behind all the witty jabs there is a kernel of gravity. Sadly, I believe I have only one left unread in this series. In that one I hope Israel realizes that his landlady, George, is his perfect life partner. Sansom doesn't have a big following because it seems he writes for Northern Ireland readers. There are so many "local" connections, jokes, words, even mispronunciations, none of which are explained for anyone not in the know. Just knowing what they are talking about is a plus, and even this ex-pat didn't understand all the references. The story is a sort of satire, with an underlying serious message that is hard to pin down. I liked this one even more than the first one in the series. ( )

very light... amusing but insubstantial, which was what I needed at the time... ( )