Joe Goldberg manages a New York bookstore, lends classics to the kid next door, and sizes up everyone he meets by what they read. Caroline Kepnes published the first novel in 2014, and the series started on Lifetime before Netflix took it over for season two. It is also one of the shows that gave us the idea for Shelf Sleuth. Every book in it is doing character work, which is the whole idea.
Drop a frame, get a number. The first 100 become Founding Sleuths.
Seen something in S1 E3? Drop the frame The first 100 become Founding Sleuths.
Joe pulls a drunk Beck off the subway tracks, and she comes back to Mooney's with a thank-you gift for him: The Da Vinci Code, in Italian. Handing a Dan Brown to a man who works in a bookstore is a bold opening move. Translating it first makes it a personality.
Joe holds up a beat-up Don Quixote for Paco, the kid from across the hall, one of the classics he lends him in the pilot.
The pilot gives Mooney's two book moments. Beck buys Desperate Characters, and a customer trades up from his Dan Brown to Franny and Zooey while Joe and Beck watch. Joe does his profiling at the register.
Mooney's is hosting a Sleeping Beauties launch, and Ethan, a store employee, sets the tone with "Let's give thanks to our Lord Stephen King." The book is Stephen King's 2017 novel written with his son Owen. Joe works the room.
Joe is working his way along Peach Salinger's floor-to-ceiling bookcase when he pulls out Ozma of Oz. The cover credits the pictures to Jno. R. Neill, who took over drawing Oz after Baum and W. W. Denslow fell out. One look at it and the episode cuts to the vault, so Peach's shelves just told Joe more about Joe than about Peach.
Right after Joe finds Peach's copy, the episode flashes back to Mr. Mooney locking a teenage Joe in the basement vault for the first time. He passes the time with Ozma of Oz. Baum's 1907 sequel opens with Dorothy adrift in a chicken coop with a hen named Billina, so the kid picked the one book in the room about making the best of a box.
A customer tries to buy An American Tragedy at Mooney's and Beck scolds him for it, because she hates Dreiser. Dreiser's 1925 novel is about a young man who lets a problem drown.
At the end of the season-two premiere, Love gives Joe, who is hiding in Los Angeles as Will, a copy of Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays as a welcome to town.
Joe talks his way into the Anavrin job with Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky's novel about a man who commits a murder and builds a theory for why he's allowed. Joe carries it like a reference letter.
Close-ups at Anavrin show Brené Brown's Daring Greatly stacked on the tables. A market that sells vulnerability by the register is exactly where Joe takes a job.
Joe keeps Conrad's Nostromo in his work locker. It is a 1904 novel about a silver mine whose treasure ruins everyone who touches it.
Joe gets his filmmaker neighbor Ellie into Raymond Chandler, and Farewell, My Lovely is the one he puts in her hands. A man who thinks he is the hero of a noir is pushing a noir on his neighbor.
In the closing minutes of season two, Joe is holding Crime and Punishment while he describes the suburbs: "Not every Siberia is cold. Some are 73 degrees and sunny with eco-conscious landscaping." Dostoevsky ends the novel with Raskolnikov exiled to Siberia. Joe ends the season in a cul-de-sac and gives it the same name.
At the end of season two, Joe watches his new neighbor read Brave New World by the pool through a hole in the fence.
Beck's copy turns up again away from Mooney's, on a pile of paperbacks with a phone parked on top of it. Joe is the one who rang it up, which on this show counts as a background check.
Joe lends his neighbor Paco a run of leather-bound classics: The Three Musketeers, Frankenstein, Ozma of Oz, Wuthering Heights and The Count of Monte Cristo. Dumas takes two of the five slots. Joe is the kind of mentor who has a syllabus.
