Beinhart, Larry. The Librarian (New York: Nation Books, c2004) 432 p.

Three university librarians in the District of Columbia become entangled in a conspiracy to steal a presidential election. The first, Elaina Whisthoven, a timid mousy young woman, quickly disappears. This brings the University Librarian, David Goldberg into the picture. Goldberg says of libraries and their users,

libraries are free places. They are clean, dry places in a stormy world. They are full of ideas and information. With all of that together, they tend to collect kooks and wackos and people who bring shopping carts with them, filled with conspiracy theories. Even a university library with restrictions on access and with campus security. There are, after all quite a few member of the faculty and student body who have wandered off the deep end of the pier. Over the years I've grown accustomed to them and learned to think of them as harmless and I'm never offended by them and I've learned that the best way to handle them, if there's no incidence of a physical violation, is on their own terms. (p. 10).

and about being a librarian,

It's a sort of communism, without ideology or Marx or any of that bullshit. We're in the business of giving away knowledge. For free. Come in, please come in, and take some knowledge. For free, no, no limit, keep going, gorge on it if you want, no, it's not a trick, a come on, a free sample and then we'll bill you later, or we'll paper your head with banners and pop-ups. Librarians don't have a lot of status and we don't make a lot of money, more than poets, but not so much, say, as your more successful panhandlers, so our ideals are important to us and the love of books and the love of knowledge and the love of truth and free information and letting people discover things for themselves and let them, oh, read romance novels or detective novels, whatever they want, and giving poor people Internet access. (p. 72).

He uses his superior library skills to battle the conspirators, assisted by head librarian Inga Lokisborg.

She's a crone, judgmental, and, by librarian standards, fierce. The lines in her face are like the fissures in layered shale, her eyes, overall, are the color of slate, but there are chips in them the color of bluestone ... (p.20).

yet without knowing what is going on, Inga hides David's computer from the authorities. She believes in the privacy of library records. David also recruits a colleague at the Library of Congress, Susie Bannockburn.

I'd known Susanne for years. And avoided her whenever possible. Her life, in the telling, was an opera of angst, her every relationship a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing, said tales regaled over low-fat lattes, Healthy Choice entrees, and in women's restrooms for decades thereafter. Listening was bad enough, but I always felt as if she wanted more, she wanted me to sail off into the idiot wind with her and create a relationship full of tugging and tearing and weeping and terminating so that she would have another sound and fury to take into tomorrow's restroom with her. (p. 213-14).

Together with a femme fatale political agent the librarians foil an ingenious plot to subvert the election process.