Margo works in a library. She is efficient, considerate, and takes on any additional responsibilities happily. Her co-workers like her. Her boss is happy with her. The patrons adore her. But she has a past. She is an absconding serial killer nurse. The entry of the employee, Patricia, a failed writer, clicks open a lock inside Margo's brain that hid her old urges. All hell breaks loose when an old patron is found dead in the library and a suspicious Patricia digs deeper into the past. Her fixation soon becomes an all-consuming obsession to revive her career as a novelist. Thus begins a cat-and-mouse game inside the silent, cosy library, which could turn violent at any moment.
How Can I Help You? is a suspense thriller set against the background of a library. The novel is written by Laura Sims and comes with much critical praise for its suspense and thrills. More than that, it is an intense character study of two women who could go to any depths for the sake of fulfilling their acute longings. I received an advance review copy of the UK edition from Verve Books, its publisher, through Netgalley in exchange for my honest feedback.
The novel is narrated from twin perspectives. The characters Margo and Patricia take turns narrating their respective versions of the story in alternating chapters. Both narrations happen in the first person and give the reader a panoramic insight into the minds of both of them. We see several events from alternating perspectives and observe how the same thing can be interpreted differently by different minds. This is also an efficient way to break the reader's concentration and subtly use diversion tactics inside the plot.
We realise that even when one of them is the perpetrator and the other is the detector of crimes, both of them have a skewed perspective on the world they live in. While Margo is a slave to her desires and is incapable of escaping them, Patricia, on the other hand, uses Margo to further her career as a writer. I feel Patricia, with all her sophistication, is more in the wrong and even accomplices Margo knowingly. Her behaviour with her boyfriend also shows a side of her personality that is brutally selfish. But as the writer uses her perspective to tell her side of the story, the reader will take time to realise this streak that is within her.
The novel also points fingers at the crumbling state of libraries and how they struggle to find their relevance in the age of the internet and sources of easy access to knowledge. The crowd that throngs the library is no longer the studious kind, with a thirst for knowledge and an interest in books. We find that it is thronged by senile elderly people on the edge of losing their sense of reality, unemployed or unemployable ones who use it just as a hangout, and many perverts. The reference phone calls that Patricia has to attend as part of her job are useless prank calls or those asking for irrelevant questions, like the TV schedule.
How Can I Help You? is a novel that excels in contrasting the setting of a library, which is usually considered the quiet sanctum santorum, with a tense atmospheric terror where unprovoked bad things can happen at any moment. The novel is essentially a slow burn, where the two characters eye each other, intently studying the opponent's state of mind and intentions, all the while trying to find the right moment to strike. It is through this close observation between the two opposing forces that the plot generates the much-needed tension and claustrophobia within the reader's mind.
Laura Sims has succeeded in producing a slow-paced thriller that generates enough suspense through the psychological battle between two contrasting figures. It is also satisfying to the addicted reader in me that the setting of a library and the importance of the plot points of certain books to the plot have been used wisely by her.
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