“Simonson’s ambitious plot casts a wide net—from treating themes of racism and religious intolerance to thwarted love and good old-fashioned greed—but she pulls it off with a sure hand.” —Publishers Weekly
Despite the taxpayer revolt, the Latouche Regional Library in the Columbia River Gorge is flourishing under Meg McLean’s leadership, until someone kills a librarian and the bookmobile comes under attack.
The 2008 election is over, and Meg McLean has finally passed a library levy. In spite of an economy in free-fall, Meg’s personal and professional lives are thriving—although her lover, Undersheriff Rob Neill, keeps proposing marriage. Chief Madeline Thomas of the Klalos offers an inherited farmhouse for a branch library—but the farm was owned by a relative of Meg’s rival and sworn enemy, library administrator Marybeth Jackman, who plans to contest the will. Disasters begin to strike: the farmhouse is vandalized, the chief’s home is firebombed, and Jackman falls to her death. In an echo of her malice, the county’s bookmobile is violently attacked by pro-censorship protestors. Meg and Rob must deal with religious zealotry, bullying, and troubled mother–daughter relationships to penetrate the morass of bad karma and a maze of crimes.
Author Simonson says, “The taxpayer revolt cost Hood River, Oregon, its 100-year-old library for a time, and that shocked me into writing Beyond Confusion, my tribute to public libraries.” She adds that the Ashland OR library was also closed at that time.
Sheila Simonson, a native of the Pacific Northwest, is the author of twelve novels, eight of them mysteries. She is a retired English and history college teacher, and she lives in Vancouver, Washington.
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