All summer long, Bev Wowak has been killing people — and she hasn’t even been all that picky about choosing her victims. Still, it’s a lot of work.
“I have to think of people to kill, and then I have to think of how to kill them,” she explained.
The veteran Mattituck-Laurel librarian “killed” John Berendt, author of the Pulitzer-nominated non-fiction best seller “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,” for overusing the Oxford comma. She knocked off former circulation desk staffer Tom Hobson with a lobster. And then there’s former staffer Ryan Anderson — who, she claimed in an interview this week, fairly begged her to “kill” him.
“So he got run over with a book cart,” Ms. Wowak said. Each of the victims was murdered in short stories she writes for her adult book group — that’s a murder a month all summer — and it’s up to the group members to solve the mystery and figure out the identity of the murderer.
The series is just one of a number of adult library groups Ms. Wowak chairs — some of which may be coming to an end next month when she retires after 34 years at her beloved library on Main Road.
There’s also her bimonthly Book, Dinner & a Movie night.
“You read the book, and then everyone brings a dish and we talk about the book, watch the movie, and compare and contrast,” she said.
This month, they’re reading Raymond Chandler’s “Farewell, My Lovely,” featuring L.A.’s most celebrated literary detective, Phillip Marlowe.
In the winter, she hosts Dinner & Cookbook night, where group members get a cookbook and must make a dish from one of the recipes.
There are theme book clubs, including a season of nothing but British murder mysteries, and a monthly Literary Café, “where we just get together and talk about books: what we’re reading, making recommendations.”
“The nice thing about my groups is we’re more than a group,” she said. “We’ve become friends. I’ve become friends with them. I’ve had new people come in that have felt very comfortable, which is what I want, and I appreciate it.
Now, though, Ms. Wowak, 74, wants to travel.
“I would stay longer, but there’s things I still want to do while I can do them, like more traveling. I’m a military brat, so really [my family] did a lot of traveling, and I just want to be able to go places and not have to hurry back for work,” she said.
She promised some of her most loyal group members that some of the book groups may continue, but on a more informal basis.
“One of them said, ‘Can’t you stay forever?’ and I said, ‘Comes a time, right?’” Ms. Wowak’s grandparents emigrated from Poland to the North Fork, and her father went to high school here, but when he joined the U.S. Air Force as a reconnaissance officer, the family moved around with his job. “Whenever he had his 30-day leaves, we would come back here, usually during the summer,” she said. Ms. Wowak completed high school in England and returned home to the North Fork, where she and her ex-husband Tom took over his parents farm stand and grew the business in Laurel. Her daughter Valerie now runs it. Her oldest daughter, Amy, lives in Chicago and works for Adobe, while her youngest, Jillian, owns a bar in Brooklyn.
The lifelong book-lover started out on the circulation desk at Mattituck Laurel Library back in 1990, when the library was still organized around card catalogs.
“I’d say that my one goal being here has been to challenge everybody to read outside their comfort zones,” she said.
If, like her, a patron loves British murder mysteries, she may push them to try Shakespeare.
“I’ve been known to pick out a 1,000-page book for them to read, and they’ve … loved it.”
It isn’t just her longtime patrons at the library that will miss her.
“I have a grandson that loves to come here and his biggest concern when he found out I was leaving was, ‘Will I still be able to go into the secret room?’
“It’s the staff room,” she said with a broad grin. “But I’ve been calling it the secret room to him for years.”
Ms. Wowak’s final murder mystery club event will be held at the library Sept. 10, when she will reveal who ran Mr. Anderson over with the book cart.