What's the Shaker Library Director Reading?

By Luren Dickinson, Library Director

One of the perks of being a librarian is that you get to meet authors, especially when you attend library meetings. At the January Midwinter Conference of the American Library Association, I was invited to a publisher's event where those
attending got to sit down and talk to authors in person. The first author I met was Thomas Perry.

We talked for a while before we realized that we had grown up 15 miles apart and
had even attended the same university, overlapping by a year or two. He moved
west to California around the same time that I was beginning my library career
and earning my graduate degree at UCLA.

WhilePerry is a prolific author in the crime/suspense genre, I had not read any of
his books, perhaps because I tend to be more of a nonfiction reader. After he
gave me an autographed advance copy of his latest title, The Boyfriend, I promised to read it when I got back home.

Perry's books are page turners, easy to read, and I finished it in two sittings. The
book is the first in a new series featuring character Jack Till, a former LAPD
homicide detective turned private investigator. After Till is hired by the
parents of a recently murdered young woman, he begins to find links to similar
crimes across the country and scrambles to stop future killings.

Since I had just met the author of the book, I felt compelled to write him to say how much I enjoyed reading his latest. Finding a generic address on his website, I dashed off a quick email thinking I would be lucky if a publisher's agent might read it. To my surprise, I received a nice reply almost immediately from Tom Perry himself thanking me for my comments!

Wanting to read more, I looked into his earlier titles and found that one of the most highly recommended was Vanishing Act, which was included on the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association's 100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century list. It is part of his Jane Whitefield series, which revolves around a woman of Native-American ancestry who helps people take on new lives and identities to escape dangerous situations.

I liked Vanishing Act partly because it takes place in the home area that Perry
and I shared, and it included a chase scene through wooded fields directly
behind the property where I lived as a boy. I decided to write him again and
tell him about the adventures I had experienced in the same location. He
responded by complimenting me on "a great letter" and said, "I
think you had as much fun following their trail as I did."

The last Perry novel I read was his first, the Edgar Prize winning The Butcher's Boy, which was a bit harder to find. Thanks to Shaker Library's CLEVNET membership, however, I was able to locate a copy at the Cleveland Public Library through our shared catalog, and a well-worn, re-bound edition was quickly routed to me in Shaker Heights.

The story of a contract killer who ends up on the run, it centers on Department of
Justice analyst Elizabeth Waring and her FBI colleagues as they sift through
mountains of information that might connect specific deaths to organized crime.
When a U.S. Senator is found dead, the pace picks up and does not stop until
the last page There are many more Thomas Perry books out there and I am sure
there will be more to come. Many are available in e-book format, free of charge
through the Shaker Library website. In fact, I just downloaded Strip to my iPad!