The Library After Dark: A Novel
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A bookseller must escape the infamously haunted library that holds her darkest secrets, but with a murderer in her tour group, escaping alive is not as simple as it seems, in this twisty locked-room thriller from the bestselling author of You Are Fatally Invited.
“Irresistible—bright and sharp and rife with danger, like a shard of mirror.”—A. J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window
Not all fairytales were meant for children.
Aria Stokes is finally feeling settled—she lives in a tiny New York apartment, works as a bookseller at a local shop, and has even taken a leap of faith in love by indulging her attraction to bookstore regular Jasper. And he seems to already know her so well.
As a Valentine’s Day surprise, Jasper gets the two of them tickets to an exclusive, after-dark tour of the Daedalus Library—the grandiose establishment famed for its immersive genre-based reading rooms and, more notoriously, its rumored hauntings. While Aria normally loves all things ghastly, this place holds more dark secrets than she’d prefer Jasper to know. Like that the last time she was here, she left a body behind.
But when the automatic-door entry malfunctions and Aria, Jasper, and the five other people in their tour group become trapped in the library, they are forced to venture through the storied rooms and hidden passageways of the Daedalus in search of escape . . . and Aria quite literally has nowhere to hide from the shadows of her past. Then the group learns there’s a murderer in their midst.
Now, as she tries to break out of the library’s intricate reading rooms, Aria has to decide who she can trust—and what secrets are best kept buried—if she wants to make it out alive.
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Community Reviews
This book really said, “What if we made Clue take place inside a haunted library… but also everyone gets a POV?” And listen, I wanted to love that setup. Haunted library? Locked-room mystery? Secret passageways? A bookseller with a suspiciously murdery past? That is the exact kind of chaos I usually eat up.
It really shouldn’t have taken me an entire week to get through this.
The biggest issue for me was the sheer number of POVs. Every time I started getting invested in one character, the narrative would jump to someone else and I’d have to play an exhausting round of “wait… who are you again?” By the halfway point, I felt like I needed a library map, a family tree, and one of those detective corkboards with red string just to keep everybody straight.
And speaking of maps… I could barely picture anything. The rooms, the hidden passageways, the characters themselves—it all kind of blurred together into one long foggy hallway of “someone is walking somewhere ominously.” Which is unfortunate because the Daedalus Library sounds incredible in theory. In my head, though? It looked like every dimly lit escape room I’ve ever seen.
That said, the atmosphere was still fun, and the premise absolutely carried me through. I love a creepy library setting, I love secrets, and I love watching characters make increasingly questionable decisions while trapped with a murderer. Aria’s backstory kept me curious, and there were enough twists to keep me turning pages even while my brain was quietly buffering.
Overall, this was one of those books where I admired the concept more than I actually enjoyed the reading experience.
If you love multi-POV locked-room thrillers with gothic vibes and chaotic secrets, this might work better for you than it did for me.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Bantam Books for this review copy.
It really shouldn’t have taken me an entire week to get through this.
The biggest issue for me was the sheer number of POVs. Every time I started getting invested in one character, the narrative would jump to someone else and I’d have to play an exhausting round of “wait… who are you again?” By the halfway point, I felt like I needed a library map, a family tree, and one of those detective corkboards with red string just to keep everybody straight.
And speaking of maps… I could barely picture anything. The rooms, the hidden passageways, the characters themselves—it all kind of blurred together into one long foggy hallway of “someone is walking somewhere ominously.” Which is unfortunate because the Daedalus Library sounds incredible in theory. In my head, though? It looked like every dimly lit escape room I’ve ever seen.
That said, the atmosphere was still fun, and the premise absolutely carried me through. I love a creepy library setting, I love secrets, and I love watching characters make increasingly questionable decisions while trapped with a murderer. Aria’s backstory kept me curious, and there were enough twists to keep me turning pages even while my brain was quietly buffering.
Overall, this was one of those books where I admired the concept more than I actually enjoyed the reading experience.
If you love multi-POV locked-room thrillers with gothic vibes and chaotic secrets, this might work better for you than it did for me.
Many thanks to NetGalley and Bantam Books for this review copy.
