The Woman in the Library

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If you love a character driven story, then I would highly recommend The Woman In The Library to you. My agent will tell you it's a story about passionate friendships and reluctant relationships in modern America, but really it's a romance. This murder mystery, whilst following a lot of the tropes of a typical murder mystery, is not run-of-the-mill.

I didn’t see that coming at all and considering this novel was a genuine pageturner with so many things going on, I wasn’t confused or anything. It is absolutely riveting and picked my interest with its impactful ending of the first chapter: main character of the story: Winifred Kincaid a.There are enough red herrings and clues to keep the reader guessing throughout the book and although the mystery was the main part of the story I enjoyed the back stories of the four friends being teased out and explored. Whether or not a character is Black will affect his story arc…but perhaps that’s the point you want to make by ignoring it. Leo has been reading the author’s in-progress novel and provides feedback on each major section that grows progressively creepier. You may be familiar with Gentill’s ten historical novels featuring gentleman detective Rowland Sinclair and though this is not part of that series it displays the same storytelling chops.

And then you have the sections at the end of each chapter, the letters to Hannah, the author writing this whole story, which add an element of mystery and suspense as well.

I’ve not read Sulari Gentill’s popular Rowland Sinclair series given I tend to stay away from historical fiction but I absolutely adored the Ned Kelly award-winning After She Wrote Him, which I read in 2020, also known as Crossing the Lines. It makes sense that Liming would posit the meaning of libraries in general in a book about what a library means to a woman: the universalization of intellectual inheritance passes by necessity through women.