Title: The Woman In The Library by Sulari Gentill
Date Published: 15th September 2022
Publisher: Ultimo Press
Genre: Mystery
Description:
In every person's story, there is something to hide...
From award-winning author Sulari Gentill comes a mischievous, twisty crime novel in the vein of Only Murders in the Building and White Lotus.
Four strangers in the Reading Room at Boston Public Library are introduced by a scream. Caught up in the subsequent murder investigation, each one finds themselves revealing more than they intended about their pasts as they race to solve the murder before one of them gets hurt. Whilst their stories unfold, so does another. Dear Hannah... As correspondence between the author and an avid fan becomes interwoven with the core tale, the boundaries between what is fiction and what is real life begin to blur, highlighting the lengths people will go to keep their secrets.
Through these entwined narratives, Gentill delves into the complicated nature of friendships, the lives we show versus the lives we lead and the ways in which art can imitate life. Or perhaps it's the other way around?
A sharply thrilling literary adventure, The Woman in the Library is contemporary crime with a clever twist.
Review:
I want to thank Ultimo Press for my copy of the woman in the library. All opinions are my own.
The Woman in the library is a unique mystery in its setup as it's a book within a book. Crime author Hannah Tigone is writing her latest mystery about a group of strangers, Freddie, Cain, Whit and Marigold, who become bonded together after hearing a scream in a library where a woman is later found dead. In between the chapters, we see feedback from her beta reader Leo, who offers her feedback but isn't as benign as he initially seems.
I was expecting just a good old-fashioned mystery, but it turned out to have a lot more layers to the story than just that. It was part mystery, part love story with a bit of true crime style storytelling mixed in there, too.
The Woman in the library is very much a character driven story. Each character felt well rounded and believable, with their own flaws and foibles. The main part of the story is told from Winifred, aka Freddie's point of view. Freddie is an Australian, living in America after receiving a writing scholarship. Her world gets turned upside after hearing the woman scream, leading her to start her own investigation.
I wished there was a little more amateur sleuthing involved with the mystery aspect of it. I felt a lot of the book was just concentrating on the characters, making the mystery a bit more slow paced than I would have liked.
If you love a character driven story, then I would highly recommend The Woman In The Library to you.
About The Author:
After setting out to study astrophysics, graduating in law and then abandoning her legal career to write books, Sulari now grows French black truffles on her farm in the foothills of the Snowy Mountains of NSW. Sulari is the author of The Rowland Sinclair Mysteries, historical crime fiction novels (ten in total) set in the 1930s.
Sulari's work has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Best First Book), the Davitt Award, the Ned Kelly Award and the ABIA. She won the Davitt Award for the A Decline in Prophets, and the Ned Kelly Award for her most recent standalone novel, Crossing the Lines.
@SulariGentill
No comments:
Post a Comment