The Bad Book Affair

November 23, 2009
In Sansom's satiric fourth mobile library mystery (after 2008's The Book Stops Here
), Israel Armstrong, an English Jewish vegetarian mobile librarian and amateur sleuth, embarks on yet another bumblingly endearing case in Tumdrum, “on the northernmost coast of the north of the north of Northern Ireland.” The day after Israel allows 14-year-old Lyndsay Morris to borrow a “bad book” (i.e., Philip Roth's American Pastoral
), Lyndsay, daughter of prominent Unionist candidate Maurice Morris, disappears. The coincidence is enough to make Israel suspect in the eyes of his boss, Linda Wei, a lesbian Chinese single mother, as well as the police and a nosy newspaper reporter. Never mind the thin plot and minimal detection. Sansom uses the naïve Israel to poke fun at politics, religion, prejudice, and pretensions of all sorts. Readers will particularly enjoy the passages devoted to the efforts to keep books like American Pastoral
out of the hands of the young and impressionable.