The Woman in the Library

 Sulari Gentill  has hit it out of the park again.  I love her Rowland Sinclair mystery series. Then Gentill wowed her readers with a stand alone, After She Wrote Him.  This mystery within a mystery was fabulous, so I was excited to read this one.  Gentill's mind works in very creative ways.

In this new mystery novel, The Woman in The Library, we meet Hannah, an Australian novelist, who is writing a novel about Winifred, a novelist writing her next book as a writing scholarship winner in Boston.  Hannah creates the other main characters in this mystery as the people Winifred, or Freddy as she is known by her friends, that Freddie meets in the Boston public library.  At first they are just characters for her book, Handsome Man, Heroic Chin, and Freud Girl, who she sees sitting at a table in the reading room.  When they hear a woman scream, they all become involved in conversation that leads to friendship.  Then they are Cain, Whit and Marigold and try to solve the mystery of the woman who screamed turning up dead in the BPL.

As Hannah develops the story plot with Freddie trying to solve the mystery, we are also privy to Hannah's correspondence with a fan, Leo, who is reading the chapters along with us and commenting on the story details.  He starts to get more insistent and graphic as the story builds, giving Hannah tips about the differences between Australian and American terminology.  Leo also gives her ideas for ways to murder and pictures of murders that he seems to find even before the police find the crime scene.   Leo also gives her advice about including CoVid references and masking in the mystery novel.  This is an interesting point , that the novel will be dated if you do or do not put references in about masks and the pandemic with the characters. It has been interesting reading novels written in the last two years and how they refer to the Pandemic.  

I really like the way Gentill uses the Leo character to add the masks and pandemic without affecting her main storyline.  This novel had a slow start and took about half way through to really become connected to the characters and the plot so that I wanted to finish reading and find out what happened.