I really wished I enjoyed this book more. I was really looking forward to a locked room mystery set in a library but unfortunately that's not what this book was. I did enjoy the story within a story but it ended up being just an average read for me.

This book started a little slow for me as it took a while to connect with the characters, but as relationships grew I became hooked. I love the story inside of a story dynamic and I love how current events were incorporated into the book through the feedback, without being a part of the larger story. I don’t mind when the pandemic or racism are part of a story and I thought this was a really clever way to touch on those subjects.
I only wish we had more in the end on Leo (both versions of him?). It just seemed like there was more to be told there.
Overall, great read!

Pub date: today, June 7th, 2022
This has been the most unusual and delightful novel I’ve read in quite some time. It’s a story within a story. The main character Hannah is writing a novel with the help of a friend, Leo, in Boston where her novel is set. Hannah is in Australia. Readers are privy to their correspondence as well as what’s happening in the novel.

I loved the prose and dialogue, especially the Australian nuances, as they are so believable. I have a daughter in law there, married to my son, an American, and I could just hear her voice in “Freddie’s” character.

This is categorized in mystery thrillers, but i found it to be more of a dramedy, with both drama and amusing lines between characters. i won’t tell you more, you must read this for yourself. It is truly a delight in many ways.
Thank you, NetGalley, publishers Poisoned Pen Press, and of course, the author Sulari Gentill, whom I’ve never heard of but sincerely impressed.

I enjoyed this book immensely. From the first sentence to the last, I was immersed in this story. Freddie, Cain, Marigold, and Whit are in the Reading Room of the Boston Public Library when they hear a woman scream. Through this event, the four of them develop a friendship but one of them is a murderer. I read a fair amount of mysteries but I actually didn't know who the murderer was until the reveal. This book was really enjoyable and a great summer read.
Thank you to Netgalley and Poisoned Pen Press for providing me a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Thank you Netgalley, Poisened Pen Press and the author for an Advanced Copy for honest review.

This is a well written story within a story. Described beautifully, the Boston Public Library sets the scene where four strangers sit at the same table. Then there is a blood curdling scream that echos through the library. The four strangers now become friends to piece together what might have happened. Now there is another layer here where Hannah has help from Leo in trying to help with locations around Boston. The plot and story line all come together for a very good ending you might have not seen coming.

This is the perfect book for mystery fans who like a fun challenge. Sulari Gentill presents a story within a story within a story that keeps the reader flipping pages to the very clever end. You first meet super fan (and unpublished author) Leo via an email he sends to the successful Australian author Hannah Tigone. She is writing a mystery set in Boston but is stuck in Australia. Leo offers to scout out Boston locations, Americanize her Aussie English and aid in any way she needs. Leo's missives are alternated with chapters from the book Hannah is writing.

Chapter One introduces the four main characters: Winifred (Freddie), an Australian writer in Boston thanks to a writer's grant; Whit, a law student desperately wanting to flunk out of law school; Marigold, a much-tattooed psychology grad student; and Cain, a published author with a dark past. They are seated together, initially strangers, in the Boston Public Library when a scream cuts the silence of the room. No body is found until the next day, leaving many questions. The unnerving experience unites the four of them while also revealing each of their secrets over the course of the book.

Leo's emails become more and more menacing and Hannah elects to ignore his advice. However, she does add him to the cast of characters as a kind next door neighbor of Freddie's. This further complicates the story line but perhaps Hannah hopes to placate the "real" Leo. Meanwhile the four new friends try to solve the mystery of the woman's scream in the library. The cat and mouse game makes them (and certainly the reader) doubt who can be trusted.

Ms Gentill weaves together the complex story threads to a satisfying conclusion. This book offer a fresh, enjoyable take on the standard mystery. I found it totally enjoyable and thank Net Galley and Sourcebooks for the chance to read it.

I loved this book!! The setting was perfect (who doesn’t love books about books!?) I loved the library feel, the characters were complex and did things that fit their personalities. I highly recommend this one!!!

𝐁𝐫𝐢𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐥𝐲 𝐰𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐞𝐧, 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐱, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐦𝐮𝐥𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝!

The Woman in the Library, by Solari Gentill, is an ingenious story within a story, simmering with all the classic Agatha Christie vibes, and a touch of Hitchcock, as well. Fascinating, well developed characters, who are thrown together in a semi-locked room scenario, in the Boston Public Library, and become friends thereafter - but that's only part of the overall work.

What a marvelous concept - a view into the mind of the "author at work". There is a story and then there is the author writing the story. The author's friend/fan, Leo, corresponds by emails, which appear at the end of each chapter. Clearly, Hannah, the author, is communicating with Leo, but we do not see her emails. The emails begin as rather innocuous, but Leo may be carrying a more sinister agenda than simply encouragement. Layer upon layer, this mystery is ripe with intrigue and puzzles to be solved. Cleverly written, with wit, a game of literary chess.

My most sincere gratitude to the author, Sulari Genille, NetGalley, and Poisoned Pen press for the opportunity to read this refreshingly new suspense fiction as an e-arc, in exchange for my honest and wholly independent review.

In the cozy splendor of the Boston Public Library, four strangers who silently share a reading table instantly forge a bond of friendship when they hear a terrifying scream, a scream which is later linked with a woman’s dead body.

This clever and suspenseful novel-within-a-novel pulled me in from the first page and wouldn’t let me go. I absolutely loved it, except for some content which I found objectionable.

Content: Profane language is sprinkled throughout the novel. A couple of sex scenes are referred to but not shown explicitly. A few gory crime scenes are briefly described.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for a digital advance review copy. The opinions expressed in this review are entirely my own. Publication date: June 7, 2022.

A bloodcurdling scream is the spark for a sudden friendship between Freddie, an Australian writer, and 3 strangers at the Boston Public Library. The group dives headfirst into trying to solve the mystery as other dangerous attacks start to occur around the area. These four barely know each other and become allies in their investigation of this mysterious scream.
Quick moving thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Thank you Net Galley for the ARC.

The Woman in the Library is a really good book. It's very well written, but I must admit I had a hard time at first keeping track of which story was the main story and which was the story within the story. Gentill certainly took a unique path/style in writing this book, and I must say that it worked! I can't say that I have ever read a book with this particular type of twists, and it kept me guessing/trying to figure out what was going on until the very end. I would recommend this book to most fiction/mystery readers, but warn them to pay close attention to grasp the storyline(s) as you go along, keeping track of who is in the story and who is in the story WITHIN the story. Overall, a fascinating, fun read, and I would love to read more from this author.

This was a great book! It kept me guessing right up until the murderer was revealed. Sadly, I had pegged the wrong killer, but it was still fun! The letters in between chapters were a little confusing at first and then, as an editor, they just irritated me because I felt like Leo was giving her horrible advice, but then it all kind of started to fall in place and the light bulb slowly started to turn on. The story within a story within a story was a bit confusing at times, but it works. It was hard sometimes to remember that the entire work was fictional.

Thank you @netgalley @poisonedpenpress and @sularigentill for my copy of this eARC in exchange of my honest review.

When a woman’s scream is heard in the Boston Public Library, four strangers are asked to stay put in the reading room as security investigates. During their time stuck together, they start to form an unlikely bond. Though little do they know - one of them is a murderer.

It’s honestly been a while that I’ve been so gripped by a thriller that I couldn’t put it down. Sulari Gentill wrote a story within the story that had me anxious to turn the page and see what’s next. This unpredictable book publishes today and is definitely one to read!

This one gets 4⭐️‘s from me!

“The Woman in the Library,” by Sulari Gentill, Poisoned Pen Press, 288 pages, June 7, 2022.

Aspiring author Leo Johnson, whose book has been rejected by publishers many times, is in the reading room at the Boston Public Library. He writes that he has been corresponding with Australian best-selling author, Hannah Tigone, for years.

He is a beta reader. Beta readers are non-professionals who read a manuscript prior to publishing. Hannah takes his emailed descriptions and incorporates them into her new novel, sending Johnson chapters as they are written. Leo enthusiastically offers comments, culture and location tips, crime-scene photos, plot suggestions, and other literary feedback.

The reading room is quiet, until a woman screams. Security guards instruct everyone inside to stay put until the threat is identified. Four strangers, who'd happened to sit at the same table, start talking. They are Cain McLeod, Winifred Kincaid, Marigold Anastas and Whit Meters.

The security guards tell them they may leave and they go for coffee. The cleaning people later find the body of the woman, in the library gallery room. The woman was Caroline Palfrey. She worked for a local tabloid.

Winifred is writing a novel. She tells us upfront that one of these people is a murderer. The chapters end with Leo’s emails to Hannah, which become more unhinged over time.
But which tale is the novel and which is reality? As the book goes on, both stories start to unravel.

Unfortunately, I found the whole thing to be convoluted and slow-paced. I didn’t care for the characters. The dialogue doesn’t sound real and Leo's going off the rails was easy to predict early on. The ending fizzles out.

In accordance with FTC guidelines, the advance reader's edition of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for a review.

A terrifying scream is the catalyst for a sudden allyship between Freddie, an Australian writer, and 3 strangers at the Boston Public Library. The group dives headfirst into trying to solve the mystery as other dangerous attacks start to occur. But how well do they really know each other? And is there another party at play here?!

I love a good whondunnit thriller. I don't want to give anything away but this story has a very interesting format- it's told in alternating related letters and chapters which peel away clues with every new entry. The premise is very unique and engaging- it had an Inception like quality- and set my expectations very high for the rest of the novel...

Here is what I liked:
- This book was layered! There were so many twists and turns throughout the book, and midway you can see just how clever this book/the writer is...
- The characters were so vivid, charming and quirky. It wasn't hard to see why they were caught up in each other's magnetic pull

Here is what I disliked:
- Unfortunately this book just completely lost me at the end. The ending seemed rushed and implausible, and my pet peeve is a messy ending after I have invested so much in a book
- Also, and this is a general note to authors writing about a younger generation, the speech did not sound like college-aged students. It was a little reminiscent of Dawson's Creek where every teen monologued like they were going through a midlife crisis. It also made the characters hard to relate to at times since their speech didn't match their circumstance

Overall I wanted the last half of the book to live up to front half and it just fell short. So 5⭐️ for the concept, 4⭐️ for the characters and 3⭐️ for overall execution which has the heaviest weight.

Thank you @netgalley and @poisonedpenpress for an ARC in exchange for my honest review. The Woman In The Library is out TODAY 📖

**Thank you to @netgalley and @poisonedpenpress for this ARC. The Woman in the Library is out today, 6/7/22.**

I don’t think I’ve ever actually discussed it on here, but one of my favorite tropes across any medium is the found/chosen family. People who start out perfect strangers and quickly become everything to each other. This book delivers in spades.

Bonded together by the simple fact that they’re all in the Boston Public Library when a scream cuts through the silence, the relationships between Winnifred, Marigold, Whit and Cain is sweet and warm and often funny.

But of course, this is a mystery and when a body is eventually discovered, the four friends become entangled become entangled in a horror that will test those newfound bonds.

The central plot and mystery are excellent, but because I’m a weirdo, I think I enjoyed the story within the story even more, with a character who slips so easily from charming and affable to outright terrifying so quickly you don’t even notice the transition.

🌟🌟🌟💫/5

Hannah Tigone, successful Sydney author, is writing a new book. She's set it in Boston, Massachusetts, and that being an almost literal antipode to Sydney, she needs some help with the local color. Traveling there is out; this is the time of COVID. Google Street View is something you're not quite going to get the "feel" of a place from; the look, yes. Maybe if it were a refresher for a previously visited place...but no. Enter Leo Johnson, Boston-based novelist and strangely excited research/local-color assistant to Hannah. His take, which becomes an intake, on the story is a framing device for a strange (and not entirely successful) hybrid epistolary/story-within-story tale of murders, criminality, race, and reconciliation.

The manner of the story's introduction:
I am a bricklayer without drawings, laying words in sentences, sentences into paragraphs, allowing my walls to twist and turn on whim...no framework...just bricks interlocked...no idea what I'm building or if it will stand...no symmetry, no plan, just the chaotic unplotted bustle of human life.

It's all there from the get-go...the beautiful, elegant phrase-making, the sheer bravado of owning up to feeling confused and not being quite up to the task in hand...well! Okay, I know where my money's going on the craps table. We're heading for Misdirection City by way of The Long and Winding Road.

What follows is largely that, only it's split into segments by the nature of its authors-collaborating (increasingly Leo inserts his personal take on the story Hannah sends him, and he doesn't hold back from the get-go). My best example of this is very early in the book, when the dreaded "separated by a common language" issue rears its confusing head.

Australian/Commonwealth-usage note: The word "jumper" does not exist in the US. It appears to mean "sweater" or "sweatshirt" more often than not as used in this book. But believe your local-colorist...it is not extant in US contexts. At all. If you say it to a street-American they will stare at you...a few might ask, in mild bewilderment, if you mean "jumpsuit" which you most emphatically do not:
<img src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuX018bspeLF1wYB6wWBwSk2Nfwx7p0i5K-y1g275B8eEdsSgH_BGNSukXnR1NyT0sVA_OgkMXAvyKmct-h9WXh_M4NQYs8ur2NoedeTbuXMj76pB56okPT64Q1iG1KAZh48hH0BLhhWVyLh8-KkcelN4JjWg1uX7VdSjxeuGhKKa-E1SNp-a3bP14gg/s320/jumpsuit.jpg"width=300>
NOT a normal, unobtrusive street-wear item like a sweater or sweatshirt. Like our Hannah means it to be. It's at this point that I began to trust the framing device, about which review-readers have heard, to deliver on its often overlooked promise: Can authors working together be translated into a satisfying reading experience?

It can. It does. It's going to require a little bit more effort from you, I will be honest; you'll need to use your own little grey cells to make the connections you need to make. I won't go into why that is, because it's not just a spoiler but because it's a feature of the story. If anyone reading this hasn't read [The Fan], it's a great next stop on the epistolary-novel-as-suspense trip. There are some very interesting similarities in the framing device...epistolary novels aren't all that often the choice authors make for suspense stories, and that accounts for a lot of it.

What keeps me from running down my street shoving the book into the hands of strangers (I live on the boardwalk in a beach town, so that's not as counterproductive as it first sounds) is the fact that the framing device keeps the pace of the action down. It's a feature of thrillers, which is what this is, to move quickly from scene to scene. In this case that does not happen. It's not a *fatal* flaw, but it's a real one.

It's all the rest of the features of Winifred/Freddie the Aussie in Boston as stand-in for Hannah the Sydney author creating her that kept me going when the pace flagged. It's the intricacies of the story-world (and the sneaky, weird ending!) that caused the most scalp-scratching moments and the most grin-producing realizations.

I'd say that four stars should shine on your path to the bookery of your choice to procure your own copy.

This is a tricky one for me to review. It was compulsively readable and kept me up far too late on a school night. I wasn't sure how I felt about the metafiction of a story within a story, but overall that worked for me and added some really delicious interest to what might have been a banal story. The interplay of Boston and Australia was fascinating as well. I definitely guessed the culprit right away, but the journey to the solution to the crime had enough twists and turns to keep me turning pages. Four thrilling stars!

4 stars!

This reading experience took a moment to get used to being so meta (a book inside a book (writing a book)) but displayed it very well. You’ll get the hang of it after two or three switches in narrative!

I was hooked immediately with the cliffhangers in every last sentence of Hannah’s story and the mystery of the classic who-dun-it. The two main characters in Hannah’s story being writers and bringing up plot devices and discussing/critiquing each other’s books was a delightful! I couldn’t put it down once I got into the story of these four unlikely characters bonding over a scream and getting pulled into the mystery of the murder and chaos that ensues from there.

If you enjoy mystery novels and behind the scenes of writing details, I think you’d thoroughly enjoy this novel.

Thank you to Poisoned Pen Press for granting me access to the ARC via NetGalley.

“I am a bricklayer without drawings, laying words in sentences, sentences into paragraphs, allowing my walls to twist and turn on whim…no framework…just bricks interlocked…no idea what I’m building or if it will stand…no symmetry, no plan, just the chaotic unplotted bustle of human life.”

THE WOMAN IN THE LIBRARY
Thank you, NetGalley, Sulari Gentill, and Poisoned Pen Press for the opportunity to read this book! It will release on June 7th, 2022.

The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill is somewhat of a unique story setup. It is actually a story within a story, almost within another story—but we will get to that later. Our story begins with four individuals who happen to be in the same area of the Boston Public Library when suddenly there is a scream. Winifred, known as Freddie, Marigold, Whit, and Cain is somewhat bonded by this event, and a friendship blossoms. However, when the news breaks that a woman was found murdered in the BPL, they begin to ponder what had happened. Then Freddie starts to get strange messages and then soon realizes they are all in danger.

I came so close to DNFing this book. The premise sounded so promising and the first two chapters had me hooked. Then the novelty wore off and the pace dragged. I could not bring myself to care about the characters, especially with those weird letters from Leo. I kept thinking how annoying his letters were and how if I were the recipient I would no longer respond…then there was the twist. And my god what a twist!! Everything changed for me in that instant.

The second half of the book is intense. I could not put it down. I had to know what happens in both stories. Everything seems to happen at once. The characters become more fleshed out. Freddie is determined to piece together this mystery, while Cain harbors so many secrets. Marigold is Marigold, I am not going to lie, she is my least favorite in the group. Whit is laid back and born into privilege. What at first seemed like a very surface-level story turned into a mystery that became unpredictable with multiple complexities–there are hints of social standing, school to prison pipeline, and guilty of self-defense. I have not felt so torn by a book before as I hated the first half but loved the second half! It was definitely worth the read in the end.