Can you trust information at face value when it’s being given to you?
While working on a separate book, author Sulari Gentill consulted with a beta reader for fact-checking and other notes on how to improve her work. Among the research he sent her was a video of a crime scene—no bodies involved, though Gentill’s husband jokingly wondered if her beta reader was killing people for research. Gentill swears this was not the case, but she added that this exchange sparked the idea for her 2022 novel, The Woman in the Library.
This murder mystery follows Australian author Freddie, who’s visiting the U.S. on a scholarship program. She finds herself in the Boston Public Library with three strangers when a scream reverberates through the building. The incident inspires Freddie to write a story with her new friends as featured characters. But as she learns more about the murder that took place, Freddie realizes one of her friends may have been involved. Framing the mystery is the correspondence between beta reader Leo and the author of Freddie’s story, Hannah. With each chapter, Leo’s advice gradually becomes more demanding and disturbing until it leads to a truth no one can ignore.
Despite the book’s stronger points—good prose, distinct characters, interesting premise—there were two glaring flaws that prevented The Woman in the Library from reaching its full potential. First was, despite the title of the book, I couldn’t tell if Leo and Hannah’s correspondence was meant to be a framing device or the central plot. On my second reread, I had to focus exclusively on Freddie’s story because Leo’s emails became a bigger and bigger distraction, to the point where I was more invested in whether or not Leo would get arrested than in who killed the woman in the library.
The other issue was that, the evidence was building up against one specific character in the friend group. And Freddie remained convinced all throughout that the friend didn’t do it, but she gave little justification for why she believed it, apart from having the instinct of a murder mystery novelist. She came to a realization in the last few chapters that helped her name the killer, but the prose didn’t reveal what this was until after the killer was revealed.
Having said all that, I did find a pleasant surprise as I was writing my review, and it was the one thing that tied Hannah’s story together with Freddie’s: the question posed in the beginning. Can you trust information at face value when it’s being given to you?
“I feel loss and lost, a hole in the place of what I believed, what I should believe.”
Now, this isn’t a story about media literacy (though I hope to one day review a story dealing with that very subject matter). But The Woman in the Library zeroes in on the question of trust and critical thinking. Both Freddie and Hannah have outside forces telling them what they think is true and that both women should just accept it. And both authors have to decide whether to trust those voices or not. In some cases, it’s easy to tell if someone is wrong or straight up lying. But sometimes, it’s much harder. And the protagonists of both stories have to trust her own intuition in order to get to the truth.
On the whole, The Woman in the Library is a murder mystery that will either have you enthralled with every page or struggling to find a cohesive narrative. If you’re a fan of the genre, I’d say give it a read and see for yourself which camp you fall into.
Final rating: 3.9/5
Many thanks for reading.
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