Help! I am about to Be Murdered!

Middle aged man, at the end of his career and with little to do surfs to repository of scanned old books, many of them containing handwritten annotations.

Comes across a book whose title page bears the handwritten comment: "Help! I am about to be murdered!".

Discovers that the book is a part of a collection/library owned by a middle aged man like him a century ago.

Finds several other books from the digitized collection which contain notes by the same hand. Describes a plot by her husband and her maid to kill the writer and dispose of her body.

Was the owner of the collection (ex libris) the murderer?

Locates the scanning agent: a private firm that collaborated with a small university. But, when he visits it, the offices as shuttered.

Asks around and finds a former employee who recounts a mysterious fire that consumed the computers and the digital files and killed the scanner, a woman. The books themselves vanished.

Research reveals that the grandson of the erstwhile owner of the books is a powerful senator. In a meeting, he denies any knowledge of the books or their whereabouts.

The police closed the case as an accident, but one former detective is far from convinced and agrees to help.

The narrator is beaten and warned off. The detective unearths a complaint by the scanner two weeks before her death: someone was stalking her and the lab was broken into.

Archived issues of the local paper: obituary confirms the death of the wife of the library-owner in suspicious circumstances. An inquiry ensued but with no results. Her husband married the maid less than a year after his wife died.

A doctor who experimented on inmates in a “black prison” camp is put to trial decades later. An octogenarian, he is suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s and remembers nothing of his past. His identity is gone. Who is on trial? Who would pay for the crimes of the erstwhile monster? Can we punish a body that had committed the crimes without the mind that had animated it?