Thank you to NetGalley, Poisoned Pen Press and Sulari Gentill for the free ebook in exchange for an honest review.

This was so unique! I loved the story within the story and the letters at the end of each chapter. It all seems interesting but normal and the first twist is amazing. I was shocked. I loved the characters and I honestly thought like five separate times that I knew who did it. Definitely give it a go!

A locked room murder mystery brings together four characters set in an ornate reading room of the Boston Public Library.
As these characters are held together when a woman screams, they strike up conversation, friendship, and even a little relationship romance.
While I enjoyed the concept of the story, it was disjointed at times, in my opinion. The plot is told through a few points of view which added unnecessary complexity. At times, this drones on, however, in a matter of just a couple of pages, it winds up.
The complexity forces your engagement to keep track and stay on the intended pace.
Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the advanced reading copy; my opinions are my own.

I did not finish this book. The premise was confusing to me and the characters were lacking depth. I was not grabbed by the story enough to want to continue. Thank you for the arc.

Great Whodunnit with a fun cast of characters. Enjoyed the format and the way the story unraveled. Great for mystery fans.

We read this for bookclub. We really enjoyed the back and forth of the characters and all the twists and turns of this whodunit! I usually guess the perpetrator, but I got this one wrong

i enjoyed this more than i thought i would!! it's always nice when a book and author surprise you and you feel like you've been given a new gift! it was a great book!

Thank you #netgalley and #poisonedpenpress for the chance to review this book.

In the Boston Public Library, there are reading rooms. In one of these rooms sit four strangers at a table: Freddie Kincaid a writer in resident, Cain Mcleod a published writer, Marigold Anastas a psychology major and Whit Metters a failing law student. Each sit at the table doing their own thing.
And then they hear a scream. When a body is found they must wait until they are allowed to leave, and in that time they start to get to know one another. Each has a reason to be there. And one in a murderer.

This was a decent murder mystery that was very character driven. It was quite slow at times because of this. I didn't particularly care for any of the characters, and I found some to be quite boring.
The plot was good and that was what kept me reading.

I enjoyed this modern day locked room mystery. Set in a library. I loved it. It gave me Agatha Christie vibes.

I was so excited to pick up this book! Based on the description (locked-room murder, four strangers tossed into a mystery, scenes set in the Boston Public Library) I thought it would be right up my alley. And…while it did have all of those elements, it fell a bit short of meeting my, admittedly, high expectations for that sort of premise. The main character, Freddie, was not very likable. She is supposedly a writer good enough to get a coveted fellowship but has only written one book and is desperate enough to be sending chapters to a man in America who from the onset is a creeper. The group of strangers is also not very believable; a wealthy play-boy, a best-selling author, and a genius level psychology student; who just happen to be there at the same time and immediately form strong bonds with Freddie even though she mostly only focuses on the fellow author. Don’t get me wrong, I gave this book 4 stars..but I’ve been told I’m overly generous with my stars. This could have been a great murder mystery but somehow the disparate elements didn’t tie together into the perfect Agatha Christie-esque book that it was clearly striving to be.

If you are looking for a thriller this one is for you. I will say it took me a few chapters to actually start enjoying the story but once I got through the first couple of chapters it had me hooked from there!

or fans of traditional mysteries and meta-mysteries, Sulari Gentill is the perfect writer for you. Based in Australia, she writes the delightful Rowland Sinclair series, which takes place in 1930s Australia. She also writes meta-mysteries that play with the structure and form of murder mysteries, notably in Crossing the Lines (US title After She Wrote Him) and most recently published The Woman in the Library. Murder & Mayhem had a chance to talk with Gentill about her work.

*This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Murder & Mayhem: How did you get into mysteries?

I think I first fell in love with storytelling when I was a child. My father would tell stories, like the stories that were written into the constellations. We'd go out at night, and he'd look up at the night sky, and he would point out Orion, and tell us the story of Orion the Giant. That was why I was confused enough to think I wanted to be an astrophysicist. I thought, “Oh, the night sky is wonderful.” I realized later on, when I went to university to study it, that I'd fallen in love with stories that my father had told about the night sky, as opposed to the stars themselves. So I have been writing in that genre perfectly happily.

It was actually my husband who just suggested it one day; I have another series that's mainly for young adults called the Hero Trilogy that was released in Australia, but not in the US. I wouldn't have said that I was an expert in the genre at all. But I just started writing.

So somehow over the years, reading and watching television and movies, I have absorbed the form of crime writing. It seemed like a very natural way to write. The wonderful thing about mystery is that it allows you to give your characters something to do. You don't have to come up with some artificial contrived reason for them to be in the same room, they are investigating a murder.

How did you go from writing your traditional mystery series to more meta-mystery ones?

I love traditional mystery. I love the conversations I can have about politics, and race, and prejudice within the framework of a traditional murder mystery. Part of that is because people know what to expect with the way the plot goes. You can actually load them up with other themes and other ideas, because it doesn't take a lot of effort to follow the plot.

Related: 15 Must-Read Mysteries and Thrillers by Diverse Authors

But after several years of writing in that genre, I feel the need to push the envelope and to write something that's truly novel. I suppose that's where Crossing the Lines and The Woman in the Library came from. It's my need to actually do something in a way that nobody else has done before. Now, you can't be sure that that is that nobody else has ever written a book like those two before, but I haven't read them.

I did want to actually twist not just the plot, but the structure of the novel itself. I also quite love removing that fourth wall and talking directly to the reader. So what metafiction is is the ability to say to the reader, “Let's talk about the fact that this is a story.”

How did The Woman in the Library come about?

The first part of this story is very meta in its own way. I was writing the tenth Rowland Sinclair novel, which is set in Boston. The reason is that American readers embraced that series and I felt really surprised and grateful, because the series is not set in the US. I wanted to write the 10th novel in America, almost as a thank you and a nod to American readers.

Related: 12 Mystery Books from Around the World

But the problem was that this was 2019 when I was writing that book. I hadn't been to America in years and I had never been to Boston. So I had a problem. But I had a friend who was in Boston at the time and he was writing his own novel. I wrote a letter and I said, “Can I pick your brain while you're there, so that I can get the elements of place right for this novel?” Because crime fiction traditionally has a very strong sense of place.

So we started, but the problem is that Larry's a much, much better researcher than I am. I tend to sort of sketch things and he does an oil painting. So not only would he answer my question, but he would also send me maps, menus, and weather reports.

Then one day, there was a murder a couple blocks from where he was staying. And he thought “Sulari is a mystery writer, it might be useful for her to know what an American crime scene looks like.” So he took himself off down to the crime scene after the body had been removed and he took footage of the crime scene.

So this email comes in from Larry with a movie file attachment and it opens up to a crime scene. My husband happened to be standing behind me at the time and he said, “Gee, I hope Larry's not killing people so he can send your research.” He certainly wasn't. But it did strike me as a really interesting idea for a novel. Of course, I didn't cast Larry as a psychopath without knowing. I told him what I was doing.

Do you find that your interest in astrophysics or practicing law has impacted your writing in any way?

The thing I'd say that's impacted my life is in the year I was studying astrophysics; it was pure mathematics. I found when I was writing, I'm what they call a “pantser” in Australia. I don't plot at all; I just sit down and I write. That seems like an unusual thing to do in crime fiction, where there's so many threads and there's red herrings. I think the reason I can do that is because I was trained in pure mathematics. So the logic of mathematics fits very well with a thread in crime fiction.

On the surface this book is right up my alley, but it was super slow moving for me. I had talked to friends that loved it and found it super entertaining and twisted. There weren't very many options for the "who did it?' As a fan of mystery/thrillers this is not my top pick!

Thanks to Netgalley for the chance to check this one out!

The book that we are going to talk about today can be simply put into these three words- writers and murders and morality. But before I get into this meat of the topic, let me just give you a gist of what this book is about.

This story is told in the format of a metafiction, which means, it’s narrated as a story being narrated inside a story. More specifically, the story revolves around correspondences between an established published author and her beta-reader. (A beta reader is someone who reads the manuscript before it gets published and helps the writer in researching and unblocking some of the plot holes or even giving the author a second opinion from an outsider eye to their draft before it’s out in the open).

As a writer, I know how much research writing a novel takes. This is in fact why beta-readers are needed. There’s also a running joke around with writers fearing what would happen if anyone ever comes across their google search history. Honestly, speaking from personal experience, we leave no stones unturned when we are researching for our stories. It takes us years and years to just collect all the information that we need, let alone to write it coherently in sentences that people will find alluring. And, our searches are the wildest! We’ll literally search anything. Yes, sometimes even about ways in which one can kill someone and not get caught.

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Honestly, in my opinion, writers would make great murderers because look at us. We do it all. We plan and orchestrate the whole thing. When someone asks, we could just tell them that it’s for research purpose for the book we’re writing AND we also kill people…not to mention fictional but it does the job in making us sound like an evil person. If anything, we are professionals. (PS. Dear writers, please don’t actually kill people. Put the knives away, please. Thank you.)

Anyway, I’m getting off topic (as usual). Let’s get back to the book.

So, when Hannah, the published author, is sending Leo her drafts, she expects him to proofread and give feedback about the manuscript as well as help her with research, since her book is set in America and she’s an Australian, and because of the pandemic, she’s not allowed to go for a research trip. Leo as expected comes to the rescue and provides all the information, mostly unsolicited even, sending her maps of the locality as well as photos that might help her write her murder mystery for reference.

The story that she’s writing is about the woman in the library called Winifred or Freddie who is also a writer. Freddie is sitting with three others in the reading room of the Boston Public Library when they hear a woman scream. Later when a woman is found dead in the library, the scream that they had heard earlier breaks the ice for them, bringing them together. Of course, gazes and words are exchanged. Friends are made. It just so happens that one of them is the murderer.

Now, I had requested this book on Netgalley at a time when I was in a terrible reading slump. Thinking that reading a murder mystery and that too from the point of view of a writer as a character in the book would be helpful because it would not only give me the thrill of mystery but also help me fall back in love with books again and get me out of the slump. And, so it did.

I loved the way it was written. The description was vivid and the writing was easily immersive, and funny and relatable even (for a writer like me). The characters were all nicely sketched out but I wouldn’t exactly say that I saw any character development for the lot of them, although I loved the friendship trope so much.

But what I loved the most was the story. The message this book tried to convey, and the contrast of characters it portrayed.

In my opinion, this book showed the contrast between pursuing writing as a passion and how writing means different things to different people. Like many writers write about their personal lives and carpe diem the hell out of those moments. Some of the writers who have led a slightly tougher life use writing as something that slows them down, that helps them reflect and retrospect and be better.

There’s the element that some of the writers write about their past to forget about it while there are some people who get so passionate about writing that they take it to any extent…sometimes even if it means that they’ll have to commit a crime to do that.

It reminded of the “Oval Portrait” by Edgar Allen Poe for some reason because it shares the same theme that having a passion might even be fatal.

There’s also a theme of morality. In understanding and differentiating between motives behind the crimes committed, and whether the bad guys that we read about and sympathize for in fiction deserve another chance in the real life, and whether they can really change their ways or is it all just fabricated in books.

If there was one thing that I did not like about this book, it was the fact that the story between Hannah and Leo, that was happening through their email entries, ended very abruptly. Because when the book started, the readers were led to think that the book that’s being written by Hannah and the correspondences between Hannah and Leo are related. I couldn’t quite feel the connection between the two stories by the end of the book.

In my opinion, the story about the woman in the library that Hannah was writing could have been a story on it’s own without any mention of the email correspondences with Leo and their whole beta-reading process. Since he was there in the story, I wanted to see the connection between the two stories and how the story that Hannah was writing was going to affect Leo and his real life. Otherwise, I don’t see the point why there was even a mention of Leo’s character to begin with.

I absolutely adored this book. Overall, I guess I would give this book a 4 out of 5 stars. There’s so much more that I want to say but I can’t because then I might end up spoiling the plot and I wouldn’t want that. I think this book would be great for people who like ‘everyone-is-a-suspect’ trope, people who want to get out of a reading slump (because the pacing will keep you on your toes) and also for people who love writing.

I would like to thank Netgalley and the author for giving me the opportunity to read this book in return of an honest opinion.

This was a really fun mystery but it kind of fizzled out for me by the end. Ultimately I was kept guessing which makes for a fun reading experience. I would be interested in checking out more of this author’s work.

This book was surprising, a story within a story. Set in a Boston Library and a murder occurs. This book kept me hooked. No Spoilers but worth the read. Will look for this author in the future.

**I received this book free from Netgalley.

I have been very excited about this book. I love the idea of a book within a book, and when it's done well, it's such a blast to read.

This book has two parts...one is the correspondence between Leo (the American) and Hannah (the Australian author) about her upcoming novel. Leo is proofreading it for her, and adding American-isms to it. At some point, the reader begins to feel uncomfortable with Leo, and the build up to his reveal is satisfying. I do wish, however, that his part to the story was more fleshed out, or that Hannah made the Leo in her manuscript the murderer so that he would have reacted to it in some way. It was a short book, and the author could have given us more with the correspondence between the two of them. I wish there had been more of that!

The book within the book was a fun mystery...four strangers bond over who killed a woman in the Boston Public Library while all of them are in the adjoining room. They become fast friends and work together to solve the mystery. There are a lot of twists and turns, and the ending is satisfying.

I had a lot of fun with this book, and enjoyed the quickness of this read.

This was an engaging plot with smart characterization.
Many thanks to Poisoned Pen Press and to NetGalley for providing me with a galley in exchange for my honest opinion.

The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill was a great story idea. Unfortunately it fell flat for me and didn't hold my attention. The characters felt lackluster and the story within a story point of view was irritating at best.

This is a book within a book within a book. An author is writing a story about a writer writing a story. Confused yet? The plot really isn’t this confusing and the real story told is told in a unique way. An author is sending chapters of their book to someone who communicates back to her his thoughts on what she is writing. Each chapter alternates with the story she is writing and the emails commenting on what she has written. The book is described as being twisty but the twist (or really the actual story) is given away half way through and spoils the natural progression of letting the reader figure it out and realization of what the real story is. The ending became anticlimactic for me. Anyway, the story within the story was interesting.

Truthfully, I read this story back in May of 2022.

When I forget to leave a review, I can still go back and think of how I received it. But right now I am drawing an absolute blank. In those situations, I go back to reviews and synopsis to help jog up my memory. Yet, nothing is really coming back to me.

Therefore, I can only assume one thing. This book was subpar at best. But without the details, I can't tell you why it didn't quite hit the homerun plate with me.