From the author of Looker comes this razor-sharp suspense about two librarians whose lives become dangerously intertwined.

No one knows Margo's real name. Her colleagues and patrons at a small-town public library only know her middle-aged normalcy, congeniality and charm. They have no reason to suspect that she is, in fact, a former nurse with a trail of countless premature deaths in her wake. She has turned a new page, so to speak, and the library is her sanctuary, a place to quell old urges.

That is, at least, until Patricia, a recent graduate and failed novelist, joins the library staff. Patricia quickly notices Margo's subtly sinister edge and watches her carefully. When a patron's death in the library bathroom offers a hint of Margo's mysterious past, Patricia can't resist digging deeper - even as this new fixation becomes all-consuming.

Taut and compelling, How Can I Help You explores the dark side of human nature and the dangerous pull of artistic obsession.

'Dazzlingly creepy storytelling, reminiscent of NOTES ON A SCANDAL' Grazia 'A short, bracing shock of a novel, easily gulped down in one sitting' Metro 'Written with a precise, sinister elegance, this is a gripping portrait of one woman's descent into madness' Heat The Professor lives in Brooklyn; her partner Nathan left her when she couldn't have a baby. All she has now is her dead-end teaching job, her ramshackle apartment, and Nathan's old moggy, Cat. Who she doesn't even like. The Actress lives a few doors down. She's famous and beautiful, with auburn hair, perfect skin, a lovely smile. She's got children - a baby, even. And a husband who seems to adore her. She leaves her windows open, even at night. There's no harm, the Professor thinks, in looking in through the illuminated glass at that shiny, happy family, fantasizing about them, drawing ever closer to the actress herself. Or is there? 'Unsettling and compelling' Tammy Cohen 'Laura Sims has pulled off the high-wire act of making bitterness delicious' Vogue

Winner of the 2005 Alberta Prize. Laura Sims's exquisite debut is the work of an organic synthesizer, one practiced in the restrained art of listening. Her poems exhibit an attenuation that is akin to devotion by means of maxim and miniaturization, she sorts and stacks the products of humanness. Memes and phonemes of a haiku-like fineness are thereby invited to break the surface of the page. Those pre-hung doors of the native state the return to a native, pre-eminent state wholly immanent, wise and wooly.