Theodosia says goodbye to her career plans to become a lawyer and shows up on her brother doorstep to finish a never she was writing. Then her mentor a highly acclaimed author is murdered and Theo sets out to find the killer. Theos own brother is being looked at as a suspect. Theo goes over and above to protect her brother and her brother sets out to follow leads to free himself which leads to destruction and intrigue. I found this story to be new and fresh not a redone story. I appreciated the relationship with the siblings and how they did what they did to uncover the truth and support each other.

Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of The Mystery Writer.

I've read two of the author's previous books before so I had a good feeling The Mystery Writer was going to be full of twists and turns.

I should have read the premise more carefully because this was chock full of unbelievable and hard to suspend disbelief scenarios.

If you're in conspiracy theories, this is the book for you.

The first half of the book had great potential; a writer young Theo Benton has befriended is found dead. As she delves into his past in hopes of finding his killer, she realizes how little she knew about him. What was he hiding?

Then, the second half took a turn for the worst.

It became too silly and too wild and ridiculous to be believed. I know conspiracy theories and theorists are now a part of our modern life, but what the author crafted was just...no, sorry, it was too absurd.

Or maybe that was the author's intent. Conspiracy theories are absurd, until they're real.

The only thing I liked was the relationship between Theo and Gus. High five for supportive sibs everywhere!

I noticed in the last quarter of the book there were a lot of typos, grammatical errors, and paragraphs missing or didn't belong on the page.

It was like I had skipped a page ahead; one minute I was reading about Mac and Gus, and the next line with no paragraph break it was Theo's POV.

I hope this gets corrected in the final version before pub.

The writing was good, but the conspiracy stuff was too much; it became tedious, repetitive, and redundant.

Also, Theo and Gus' parents are hippies, and Mac's parents are Doomsday preppers, two extreme factions on either end of the political spectrum.

It made me wonder if the author had a not so subtle political agenda of their own they were weaving into the narrative. At least, it began to read that way to me.

I enjoyed the first half of the narrative, but then it went so far down the rabbit hole I refused to follow.

This is the third murder-mystery book by Sulari Gentill (After she wrote him, The woman in the library) that is set around authors, readers and libraries, and packed with intrigue.
Theodosia Benton arrives unexpectedly at her brother Gus's doorstep after abandoning her law studies in Australia to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. In Lawrence, her new small hometown in Kansas, she meets the famous author Dan Murdoch at a local coffee shop, where they become quick friends and bond over their shared passion for writing. After finishing her novel, Theo turns to Dan for help in approaching his prestigious Day Delos agency, but he surprises her by dismissing the agency as unsuitable for a writer of her caliber. This unsupportive response deals a significant blow to Theo's aspirations.
To patch things over, Theo and Gus stop by Dan’s house for a dinner invitation. They are welcomed by an open door, a slippery floor, and the lifeless body of her beloved author… and the intricate plot with lots of twists and turns begins. As more people die, and every victim has a connection to Theo, the police keep looking at her as a suspect instead of protecting her. Theo grapples with the unraveling mystery with the help of her lawyer brother Gus and his close investigator friend Mac Etheridge. Theo’s dream of pursuing a writing career has unwittingly dragged her and her loved ones into treacherous territory: Dan Murdoch’s zealous fans, a nosy young journalist ready to expose Theo’s secrets, a cadre of eccentric doomsday conspiracy theorists lurking in the shadows, and a perilous web of powerful and dangerous individuals. 
This is a masterfully executed, multi-layered narrative with a unique concept that grips you from the start. While the pacing slows down slightly in the last third of the story, it adds depth and drama to the narrative. The final chapter picks up the pace and delivers a brilliant conclusion.
My thanks to Poisoned Pen Press and NetGalley for a free advanced copy of this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review!

At the beginning; we learn a good amount about Theo and her relationship with her brother , but it is not until D's murder that the plot gains momentum. From here, we are introduced to more characters, like the Mac and his Prepper family members ugh lol !

It is near the end of the book where things begin to fall apart. Much like the conspiracy theories implied throughout the novel, holes start to get poked in the storyline and everything goes haywire, leading to an over-the-top and cluttered last section of the book.
Overall, this is a fun read with an original plot has alright characters

The Mystery Writer begins Theodosia Benton quitting school and showing up in Kansas at her brother’s home. It had been years since he had seen his sister. Theo finally explains to him that she has left law school and is writing a book. Gus provides her a place to live, and she finds a local café to write. It is her that she meets a fellow writer. He begins to mentor her. She completes her novel and gives it to him in hopes of him sending her on the right track to a publisher. The following day she finds him murdered and no signs of who did it or where her novel is. Theo soon becomes a suspect and when bodies start showing up around her all signs point to her and her brother.
Sulari Gentill creates a great story with well-developed characters and lots of plots and twist. At times the conspiracy emails were difficult to determine their reasons or use but it slowly comes around. I felt the ending was rushed and the time jump from the arrest to the trip to see their parents to Dallas provided a few moments of questioning how we got her but overall, it was a great read and one more conspiracy theory to wonder about.
Thank you NetGalley, Poisoned Pen Press and Sulari Gentill for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

Overall, I liked this book and really found the idea it is based on to be thought provoking. Lots of action takes place in a coffee shop, so you’ve got to love it!

Given the times we live in, the use of conspiracy theories and the lengths some of the followers go to, is especially interesting. I felt the story jumped around a bit and I lost interest. Once the story takes off and the author pulls everything together, it was a great read.

Sulari Gentill again uses a writer as her main character to explore what writing means but from yet another perspective. We are quickly pulled into the narrative which takes us on a remarkable journey with many twists and turns.

If Theo knew what awaited her in Kansas,she might have thought twice about abandoning university in Australia. But she doesn’t know what’s coming and she’s decided she does not want to be a lawyer but wants to write books. With no warning, she shows up on her older brother Gus’ doorstep. Not only is he thrilled to see her, but he also supports the fact that she wants to follow her passion. What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a bit actually. Theo meets a successful writer Dan. He not only encourages her, but they also become close, and she thinks she might be falling in love. She is shocked when she finds him dead, and it wasn’t a natural death. He was murdered, and the police seems to believe Theo killed him.
If you think, that’s the worst thing, that will happen to Theo, well buckle up, because the twist and turns just keep coming. Soon, her brother has lost everything, and his best friend Mac is in the line of fire too.
Theo has a short window to try and save Gus and Mac, but will these two leave Theo in the past, or will their desperate search, make them all targets once again.
Quite different than The Woman in the Library. Theo’s naivette had me rolling my eyes more than once. I can’t say more because of spoilers, but I never guessed where the story would go. The best way I can describe it is to say the plot was Cray Cray.

I received this book as a promotion from the publisher. My opinions are solely my own.
I really struggled with this book in the first 1/4 because of the "conspiracy theory ".
I pushed through that part and ended up sucked into the story and characters.
Theo, Gus and Mac quickly became believable characters. I thoroughly enjoyed the Lawrence and KU factors that helped me get into the story

I like to read mystery novels and I was hoping that this would be another intriguing mystery; however, I found the pacing of the book to be very slow at the beginning. I found it a challenge to keep reading until 60 pages in. By then I had a fairly good idea who the murder was without much trouble which was a disappointment. It is an interesting premise; however, I found the pacing to be slow and the characters wandered a lot while trying to solve this mystery. I think this book could have used more editing and maybe a bit of pruning to tighten up the plot.

Theodosia Benson leaves her law studies in Australia and shows up unexpectedly on her brother's doorstep in Kansas, determined to finally devote her. time to writing. She soon develops a routine of writing at a nearby cafe, where she is taken under the wing of a well-regarded and established author, Dan. After Dan is found dead, Theo is the most likely suspect, while in the background conspiracy theorists have their own ideas of who Dan was and why he died. The main characters Theo, her brother Gus, his friend Mac, and a publishing agent Veronica are interesting characters worth exploring, and would be welcome in further books about Theo.

2.5 Stars🌟

After giving The Woman in the Library 5 stars, I had high hopes for this book and found the premise intriguing. I think it started off rather strong, but as I continued reading, I found myself becoming less and less interested in the story and just wanted to get it over with.

I found multiple grammar errors in the book, which is not unexpected in an ARC and I’m sure will be fixed before the final copy is printed. However, it felt like this story still needs quite a bit of developmental editing. At some points, I felt like it was constantly jumping from one person’s POV to another, even within the same scene. There were also a few time jumps where months or even years have passed by that you’re not expecting and aren’t really sufficiently explained. With both of these, it just felt very jarring as a reader, and I felt like I couldn’t get a solid grasp on what was happening.

I also didn’t appreciate some of the political undertones in this book. There are some “conservative” and “Christian” characters who are written in a very extreme way and are certainly not representatives of the majority of those who are conservative or Christian in America. I fear those who read this book who are not conservative/Christian or those who do not understand the American political climate could get some false ideas about these groups of people from the comments and insinuations made in the story.

Overall, the idea of the book was good, but I don’t think it was executed well.

Thank you to NetGalley for a complimentary e-ARC of this book! All thoughts and opinions above are my own.

I enjoyed the thrill of the first 2/3 of this story. It was well written and made me look at all the shadows and the people around me. But when the time jumps started happening, the book felt rushed and the story got confusing. I’m not sure if in the paper version if there were page breaks which would denote these large passages of time but there were no breaks or lines or bolded words indicating how much time had passed, which was odd. Additionally, there were significant events that occurred during the time passages that are never fully explained or recorded that could have fleshed out the story more. Her parents never appeared again, which was odd. Not a bad read but seemed like the writer ran out of time to turn in the story and needed to get it done so skipped fleshing out those parts which could have added to the book.

This is another brilliant mystery from Sulari Gentill! What I liked best: that you will second guess the actions and motives of every single character, over and over. You will wonder who is behind the mayhem and why. You will question just who are the “good guys” and who are the “bad guys” and then wonder if there is even a distinction. It is a novel about murders in a small town, but also about the conspiracy theories that abound in 21st-century America, constructed in an innovative story that is also about writers and the business of publishing. I found this book captivating and unsettling (I mean that in the best possible way) and absolutely one of the best mysteries I have read this year. Thanks to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for the opportunity to review this book.

The Mystery Writer by Sulari Gentill was a book that I just finished reading yesterday and I was a bit disappointed because the storyline zoomed in different directions simultaneously and I found it very hard to follow what was happening. I also could not engage with the characters as I usually do in other books because they were not well elaborated on as to what their likes/dislikes were, their past histories, their relationships with others, etc. so I felt distant from them and their adventures.

The pace of the storyline went too fast for me to get a good grasp of the various settings in the storyline and the interactions between characters. For example, at one point, the main characters, Cormac, Gus, and Theodosia, were arrested by the police for further questioning in the murders of three individuals - Mary Cowell, Burt Winslow, and Dan Murdoch, and before I could get the scenario well established in my mind, I found out that Theo disappeared. It left me hanging in the lurch and it wasn't until later on in the novel, that I found out what happened to Theo. Additionally, the fight scenes in the novel felt too simplistic for my liking; there should have been more elaboration of the physical struggles between Jock and Bellhop and our protagonists. When Mac and Augustus start looking for Theo and discover that she is in Dallas, the storyline veers off unexpectedly to Theo's situation with Veronica Cole which left me puzzled as to how Mac and Gus's search for Theo connected with Theo's escape from the hotel room in Dallas; I didn't find that the storyline flowed very well. Although the author does explain some of the questions that I had about Theo and how she disappeared during the story, and how Mac got locked in prison (in the aftermath of Gus's shooting) and what happened to Gus when he came out of the hospital, I could not say that I was entirely satisfied overall for the book's entertainment value. I will not factor out reading future novels from this author as she is a good writer and her plot was good enough to be publishable however it felt that more development to the storyline was necessitated. I do hope to read more from Sulari Gentill.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing an electronic ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

It's a little difficult for me to gather my thoughts about this book as it started out absolutely great and then turned into what I could only describe as a disaster. I did enjoy some of the characters, mostly Theo and her brother, along with a few other male characters here and there. I thought there was a bit too much plot, if I can say so, in the sense that people started dying and there was a lot of intrigue -- for hundreds of pages, you don't find out anything about the mystery per se. As any reader knows, it can be frustrating to continue reading something and wait for at least a serious clue for pages on end, without getting any 'reward' whatsoever.
Then, about mid-way, I was seriously put off by a few descriptions. Unfortunately, I was met with a few character patterns that I have encountered in many, many other books, the types you buy for $.99 in the Kindle Store and that aren't necessarily the best ones.
Finally, the ending was just disappointing. Similarly to other reviewers, I figured out what the mystery was (or at least suspected it) pretty early. All I can say is that the ending was what convinced me to give a 2-star rating to this book... Too over the top and too unlikely. These things just don't happen in real life like they were presented here, and if I had been reading a fantasy novel, it goes without saying that I would've had other expectations. But this was supposed to be a contemporary mystery.
It was an interesting experience, though, since one can mostly tell if they're interested in a book or not in the first 100 pages -- it took more than 200 for me to realize that this was going nowhere and that I should've probably not requested it on NetGalley.

I LOVED The Woman in the Library, so consequently I had high hopes for this one. For me, it fell flat. The premise is actually quite interesting, but the storyline felt poorly executed and the timelines were odd. It abruptly shifted forward months or years without any warning or context clues. Additionally, the POV kept changing, sometimes even within the same chapter.

I think this book is good but could’ve been better.

This is my second book by Sulari Gentill, and I enjoyed it! I really liked the beginning and some of the initial twists - I did feel like it jumped the shark a little at the end which made the conclusion feel less interesting. The core three characters, Theo, George & Mac, are awesome, relatable but all a litttttttle unreliable, which improved the reading experience. I would generally recommend to folks who enjoy mystery/thrillers with lots of twists (this is definitely not cozy, my friends). 3 stars - I liked it.

Content Warnings: murder, sexual assault, stalking, gun violence

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for this eARC!

After reading and enjoying Sulari Gentill’s The Woman in the Library, I was super excited to pick up her latest book, The Mystery Writer. I found The Woman in the Library to be clever and creepy, and I was hopeful that The Mystery Writer would top it.

To say I was disappointed would be an understatement, to say the least.

The Mystery Writer was a slow-paced, convoluted story that was honestly so ridiculous at parts that I had to roll my eyes and walk away. The novel follows the story of Theo Benton, an aspiring author who drops out of law school and moves to the US to live with her older brother. As she starts working on her manuscript, she befriends an older author who takes her under his wing. Everything is going great — Theo is finishing her manuscript, her relationship with her mentor is turning into something more — until her mentor ends up dead, and Theo is the prime suspect in his murder.

But that’s not all. It turns out that Theo’s dead mentor was involved in a conspiracy that might just go all the way to the top. And now Theo isn’t just caught up in a murder; there’s a whole web of secrets, lies, and violence in which Theo finds herself thoroughly wrapped.

This sounds right up my alley. So what went wrong?

To begin with, the writing itself felt amateurish and unedited. The book read like a first draft: lots of potential, but lots of cleaning up to do. I overlook a lot of typos and mistakes in ARCs, since they are not finished with editing, but this book had a long way to go in that aspect. There were also continuity errors and logical inconsistencies that took me out of the story on more than one occasion.

My biggest problem, though, was the character of Theo. I wanted so badly to like her, but I found her so clueless as to be unbelievable. I understand that books typically need miscommunication and bad choices for the sake of having a story, but this went far beyond that. Theo overlooked every red flag in her path and constantly put herself in harm’s way out of unimaginable ignorance. It was hard to root for her when it seemed every decision she made was so wrong.

I also found the plot to be unbelievable to the point of, quite frankly, absolute ridiculousness. This was not a murder mystery, it was a conspiracy-theory thriller completely unrooted in reality. With too many characters, a litany of alternating perspectives, and abrupt time jumps of years, I just could not center myself within this story. I could not even bring myself to invest in the story; I only wanted it to end.

I love metafiction and murder as much as the next guy, but sadly, this is not a book that I would recommend to anyone.

⭐️: 3.25 / 5

Publication Date: March 19, 2024

I want to thank Poisoned Pen Press and Net Galley for allowing me to get an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review!

The prologue leaves you with a sense of “wait…what?”. And if I’m being totally honest I don’t think it’s ever addressed later in the book either.

Some of the coolest aspects of this story, was that part of this book was the process of writing a novel. The use of electronic posts, reminded me of Reddit posts/comments and I thought that added an interesting element to the developing story.

As for my reservations, this book took a turn to the ridiculous. Some of the actions and decisions that the FMC does had me rolling my eyes a bit and felt like it was realistic. As for the rest of the plot, I was on board until the climax started to happen towards the end and it just felt so out of left field which I was really disappointed to see. Some scenes were summarized in an odd way instead of writing out the scene as it deserved while some paragraphs were dedicated to the FMC thinking through events that felt redundant.

Overall I liked this book but the ending really took away some of the enjoyment. I felt like this was a quick and easy read to get through. I think that others will enjoy this book and it definitely had a unique premise.

Would recommend for those who are fans of
- Books about writing books
- Author FMC
- Conspiracies

⚠️ violence, assault