Cunningham, E.V. Sylvia (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1960) 333 p.

A detective's search for a woman's past leads him at first to a branch of the Pittsburgh Public Library, and its librarian, Irma Olanski.

I guessed that she was my age, which is thirty-six, give or take a year or two in either direction, and with my first look I appreciated the clean-cut handsome planes of her face. Either you saw and recognized that immediately with Irma Olanski or you never saw it, and after that she would be to you a plain and rather severe woman, a tall, dry woman approaching a loveless and lonely middle age. Her brown hair, already streaked with gray, was drawn back tightly on the sides of her gray-green, her brows straight, her lips bare of lipstick, and only the width and the fullness of her lips suggested anything more than a colorless spinster librarian. (p. 60-61).

Irma helps the detective and they develop a close, if brief, relationship.