Open up any library book you’ve checked out. See that date? Have it back by then or Special Agent Bay of Library Police will be on your ass.

You don’t want him on your ass.

At once a sly parody, engaging police procedural and an unlikely adaptation of a true story, Jason Shiga’s BOOKHUNTER is a wholly original graphic novel with a sense of humor as strong as its franchise-ready concept and its artists’ bold-line style.

In a prologue that hilariously sends up cop-movie clichés to a clever extreme, Bay busts a self-appointed book censor by busting into his apartment. It doesn’t end pretty, and with the defacer ending up screaming on his kitchen floor in a pool of his own blood and urine — and Bay responding, “Shh!” — you know BOOKHUNTER can be stamped certifiably special.

Then we get to the comic’s core plot, set in the ’70s: a triple-level locked-room mystery involving the switch of a kept-under-glass-display 19th-century English bible for a phony one. The mystery is genuine, and Shiga sees it out step by step, clue by by clue, for all of its 144 pages. No process of the investigation is spared, so it’s like Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct novels, only if they were illustrated and the characters partly resembled Fisher-Price people.

The solution isn’t a cop-out, either, but a fully thought-out explanation, resulting in an action-packed showdown/chase that makes inventive use of all the normal things in a library, from card catalogue files to book carts and security systems.

Though Bay and Co. never tell jokes, Shiga’s choice to go deadpan makes for several outrageous moments, with at least one laugh-out-louder. His art — lots of circles and curvy lines — is a style all his own that clicks perfectly. (And how utterly refreshing to see a cartoonist of Asian descent drawing his way, rather than that god-awful, cookie-cutter manga look.)

If this isn’t damn near genius, then it’s already genius. –Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.