Trigger warning for references for rape.
Hana Babić has been laying low for a very long time when the past reaches out to snatch away one of her only friends. No one in her rural Minnesota town knows that the librarian who always wears long sleeves once had a different name, once lived in the middle of a war zone, and once hunted down the men who brutalized and killed her family. The Quiet Librarian, by Allen Eskens, is anything but quiet.
The plot of this book kicks rapidly into action when Detective David Claypool arrives at Hana’s library to deliver the terrible news that her dearest friend, Amina, has died after being attacked by an unknown man. Hana is cagy with the detective. While she very much wants to know what happened to Amina and who did it, Hana is afraid to reveal that she is in the US under a false name. Getting too close to any kind of law enforcement will open a very nasty case of worms.
We know early on what’s in that case of worms. While we watch Hana dust off her old skills as a hunter of men, alternating chapters take us back to the late 1980s and early 1990s in a place in what would become Bosnia that’s so remote there isn’t even a town. Nina Divjak, who would one day become the retiring Minnesota librarian, lives an idyllic life until Yugoslavia collapses into ethnic, religious, and political violence. People Nina thought were her friends instantly turn on her because she and her family are Muslim. Neither young Nina nor older Hana seem to care much to learn why Serbian Christians attack and brutalize her people. She’s much more interested in revenge.
What made The Quiet Librarian most interesting to me was Hana. I love a pragmatic protagonist who isn’t afraid to hit first and hit hard. It was refreshing to see a woman protagonist who only questions herself about the best ways to hunt down her enemies and keep her secrets, not about whether or not she should leave things to conventional justice. Her relationship with Detective Claypool adds an interesting wrinkle to this tale of vengeance, though I quibble at how believable his actions are at the end of the book when everything has to get resolved. Readers looking for a thriller that doesn’t involve geopolitics or espionage might enjoy this one.
I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley, for review consideration.