The Woman in the Library is a closed-room literary mystery novel by Sulari Gentill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars (4.5 rounded up to a 5)

The Woman in the Library is a closed-room literary mystery novel by Sulari Gentill. The ebook version is 288 pages. We follow our main character with a first person point-of-view.

Four strangers are sitting at the same table in the Reading Room at the Boston Public Library, when suddenly they hear a woman’s scream. To pass the time they are confined in the room while security figures out what’s happened, the strangers strike up a conversation and become friends. Freddie is our point-of-view character, who is an Australian novelist present in Boston due to a fellowship she was awarded. She befriends Marigold, a psychology student and former ballerina, Cain, a fellow novelist with a mysterious past, and Whit, a law student desperate to get out of the family law business.

I really liked the framing device used for this book. The basic idea for it is that we are reading a manuscript chapter-by-chapter and said chapters are followed up by correspondence from a fan of the author writing the book. At the back of the book, there is a Reading Group Guide with discussion questions, along with A Conversation with the Author.

Tropes in this book include: closed-room mystery, book within a book

CW: stabbing, murder, death

Special thanks to Poisoned Pen Press and NetGalley for providing an eARC of this book for me to review. All opinions contained herein are my own. The Woman in the Library releases on June 7th, 2022.

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