When Emily French made Leonard Vole the principal heir to her fortune, she didn't realize he was already a married man.

Vole immediately becomes the prime suspect in her murder and things look bad for his defense. When Vole's wife, Romaine, agrees to testify as a witness to the prosecution, the situation takes a turn for the worse. She claims he did it.

Romaine, however, has motives of her own.

To find out how it ends, curious minds have to attend Salem Public Library's first Adult Storytime, Sept. 8 at 10 a.m. in Loucks Auditorium for a reading of Agatha Christie's "The Witness to the Prosecution."

"We wanted to ease people into it, so we're starting with the classics," Sonia Somerville, spokesperson for the library, said.

The public library hosts readings for children eight times a week with great success, but the notion of the adult story time was cribbed from the Seattle Public Library - with a few tweaks.

"Unlike the Seattle library, we're not located in the heart of downtown, so we couldn't expect a lot of people to walk in on lunch breaks. We decided to tailor the readings to our senior audiences who had been overlooked a bit recently," Somerville said.

With only an hour to fill, short stories cannot extend beyond 20 pages or so, and themes will change every two months. Several volunteers from the library staff, some with radio and television backgrounds, conduct the readings.

"The short story is something of an unheralded genre so this is also a departure from the library's traditional focus on novels," Somerville said.

Somerville said organizers are open to story and theme suggestions from the audience.

Initial themes include "House and Home," "Holiday Spirit," "All's Fair in Love," and "Family Ties That Bind and Chafe."

Somerville said patrons shouldn't be surprised when some more offbeat selections make their way into the line-up.

"There could definitely be a sci-fi story during the 'Ties that Bind' theme," she said.

Somerville acknowledged that while this initial offering is aimed at active seniors, organizers are open to possibly expanding offerings to include an evening event for a younger crowd.