Raymond Ambler, crime-fiction curator at New York City’s prestigious 42nd Street Library, doesn’t consider it a big deal when he misses a call from visiting professor Robin Cartwright…until she turns up dead in a hotel room. Ambler feels duty-bound to find the culprit, and not just because the police half-suspect he’s guilty of the crime. It wasn’t just Professor Cartwright’s phone call he missed, but any sign that she was in danger. Robin was researching accidental deaths she believed were murders. Could her work have gotten her killed? Soon Ambler is knee-deep in suspects, including a shady ex-husband, a slippery pastor, and at least one of his own colleagues. If he doesn’t catch a ruthless killer soon, it won’t be just his own life in danger, but also those of his partner and newborn child.

July 1950: Mick Mulligan has just hung out his shingle as a private investigator in New York’s sweaty Hell’s Kitchen. A former Hollywood cartoonist who was blacklisted during a communist witch hunt, Mick is in need of a paying gig to make his child support payments. But maybe not this gig. Last year, universally reviled cab company owner Irwin Johnson was murdered. One of his drivers, an African American Communist Party member named Harold Williams, was arrested, tried and found guilty, despite scant evidence. Now his execution date is two weeks away. New York City labor leader Duke Rogowski asks Mick to find fresh evidence that might buy Harold a stay of execution. Lots of people might have wanted Irwin dead, but no one has any reason to help Mick exonerate Harold. Yet Mick can’t abandon a potentially innocent man to the electric chair. Can he pull off a miracle?

A note from bartender Brian McNulty, Raymond Ambler’s friend, confidant and sometimes adviser, sets the librarian sleuth off on a murder investigation, one that he pursues reluctantly until a second murder upends the world as he knows it. The second victim is a lady friend of McNulty’s --- and the prime suspect is McNulty himself. As Ambler pursues his investigation, he discovers that the murdered woman had a double life. While Ambler looks into the past of Dr. Sandra Dean to understand the murder of Shannon Darling in the present, NYPD homicide detective Mike Cosgrove investigates the men in Darling’s life. Yet, no matter which way he turns, McNulty emerges as a suspect.

When a murder desecrates the somber, book-lined halls of New York City’s iconic 42nd Street Library, Raymond Ambler, the library’s curator of crime fiction, has a personal interest in solving the crime. His quest to solve the murder is complicated by personal entanglements involving his friend --- or perhaps more-than-friend --- Adele Morgan. Ambler suspects that the murder of the young woman, who had been working at the library under an assumed name, and the curious intervention of NYPD’s intelligence division are connected. The trail of intrigue leads to a seemingly unrelated murder in an upstate prison and a long-ago murder of a trade union reformer.

MURDER AT THE 42nd STREET LIBRARY follows librarian (and reluctant sleuth) Raymond Ambler and his partners in crime-solving as they track down a killer, shining a light on the dark deeds and secret relationships that are hidden deep inside the famous flagship building at the corner of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. In their search for the reasons behind the murder, Ambler and his crew uncover sinister, and profoundly disturbing, relationships among the scholars studying in the iconic library.