Title: The Woman in the LibraryAuthor: Sulari Gentill
Published by: Poisoned Pen Press on Jun. 7, 2022
Genres: Mystery/Thriller
Pages: 288
Format: ARC, Paperback
Source: Poisoned Pen Press
Book Rating: 8.5/10
In every person’s story, there is something to hide…
The ornate reading room at the Boston Public Library is quiet, until the tranquility is shattered by a woman’s terrified scream. Security guards take charge immediately, instructing everyone inside to stay put until the threat is identified and contained. While they wait for the all-clear, four strangers sitting at the same table, pass the time in conversation and friendships are struck. Each has his or her own reasons for being in the reading room that morning—it just happens that one is a murderer.
Award-winning author Sulari Gentill delivers a sharply thrilling read with THE WOMAN IN THE LIBRARY, an unexpectedly twisty literary adventure that examines the complicated nature of friendship and shows us that words can be the most treacherous weapons of all.
Review:
Devious, intense, and full of surprises!
The Woman in the Library is an intricate, twisty, complex thriller featuring Hannah, a successful writer who is writing her latest mystery about four strangers, Freddie, Cain, Whit, and Marigold, who accidentally meet one day as they all share a table in the Boston Public Library and after they hear a woman scream subsequently work together to not only identify who the slain woman was but who out of the four of them, as impossible as it may seem, actually murdered her.
The prose is complex and tight. The characters are multilayered, secretive, and consumed. And the plot builds nicely to create just the right amount of tension and suspense as it unravels all the different personalities, questionable motivations, duplicitous actions, and relationships within it.
Overall, The Woman in the Library is a compelling, sly, creative tale by Gentill that, with its story within a story, is a clever, unique, addictive whodunit that certainly kept me guessing from start to finish.
This book is available June 7, 2022.
Pick up a copy from your favourite retailer or from one of the following links.
Thank you to Poisoned Pen Press for providing me with a copy in exchange for an honest review.
About Sulari Gentill
Once upon a time, Sulari Gentill was a corporate lawyer serving as a director on public boards, with only a vague disquiet that there was something else she was meant to do. That feeling did not go away until she began to write. And so Sulari became the author of the Rowland Sinclair Mysteries: thus far, ten historical crime novels chronicling the life and adventures of her 1930s Australian gentleman artist, the Hero Trilogy, based on the myths and epics of the ancient world, and the Ned Kelly Award winning Crossing the Lines (published in the US as After She Wrote Hime). In 2014 she collaborated with National Gallery of Victoria to write a short story which was produced in audio to feature in the Fashion Detective Exhibition, and thereafter published by the NGV. IN 2019 Sulari was part of a 4-member delegation of Australian crime writers sponsored by the Australia Council to tour the US as ambassadors of Australian Crime Writing.
Sulari lives with her husband, Michael, and their boys, Edmund and Atticus, on a small farm in Batlow where she grows French Black Truffles and refers to her writing as “work” so that no one will suggest she get a real job.
