Dobson, Joanne. The Maltese Manuscript (Scottsdale, AZ: Poisoned Pen Press, 2003) 275 p.

Enfield College's library boasts a fabulous collection of detective fiction. Curator of Special Collections Rachel Thompson is "tall and full bodied" (p. 26), "Live, vivid" (p. 267). She is trying to keep it quiet that the library has lost five hundred thousand dollars worth of rare first editions and manuscripts including a draft of The Maltese Falcon with Dashiell Hammett's handwritten corrections. But when a scholar is found dead in the closed stacks the police investigate.

Librarian Nellie Applegate is just the opposite of Rachel. She is "small, dry as dust" (p. 28), an "insubstantial wraith" (p. 267). She also plays her part in the mysterious goings on at the library. But the crucial investigation is carried out by a professor and a mystery writer when they break into the library.

Row after row of tall shelves stretched back into the shadows seemingly into infinity. I had a sudden eerie sense of disconnection from the present, as if we had somehow escaped the confines of time and matter and entered simultaneously into all the worlds pressed in ink and bound into these volumes, as if we had penetrated the collective consciousness of brains long since reduced to scattered molecules of insensate matter. (p. 237).

This magical mystical world becomes the scene of denouement.