The Library After Dark
A Novel
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- Pedido anticipado
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- Se espera: 5 may 2026
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- $199.00
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- Pedido anticipado
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- $199.00
Descripción editorial
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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An off-hour tour of a fabled New York City library turns deadly in this overstuffed mystery from Pliego (You Are Fatally Invited). The Daedalus Library is known for its neo-Gothic architecture and for housing the last remaining copy of The Dark Hearth Tales, a controversial collection of 19th-century fairy tales. After Evangeline Riordan, the library's founder and patron, dies under murky circumstances, the library decides to host an exclusive "after dark" tour. Bookseller Aria Stokes's new boyfriend, Jasper, surprises her with a ticket, and she accepts, despite her dark history with the library. Aria and Jasper are joined by five other guests, including a retired nurse and a Scottish professor, with whom they navigate locked rooms, secret passageways, and possible paranormal activity. Then a lock malfunctions, trapping the group inside, and a member of the tour group turns up dead, prompting the others to fear there's a killer among them. Pliego alternates between first-person chapters from each tour member and spooky passages from The Dark Hearth Tales. Unfortunately, she does little to differentiate the characters' voices, and a third-act pileup of secret identities and narrative rug pulls grows exhausting. Eerie atmosphere aside, this misses the mark.