The Woman in the Library

In the hushed reading room of the Boston Public Library, four strangers sit at the same table when a woman's scream tears through the silence. Security seals the building, and while they wait to be released, the four fall into conversation and, improbably, into friendship: Freddie, a visiting Australian writer; Whit, a genial law student; Cain, a brooding novelist; and Marigold, an anxious psychology student. By the time they are let out, a body has been found — and the new friends realise the killer may be one of them.

But nothing here is quite what it seems. Freddie's story is itself a manuscript, written chapter by chapter by an author named Hannah Tigone and mailed to a devoted correspondent named Leo, whose letters — appended after each chapter — grow steadily stranger and more menacing. As the mystery inside the novel deepens, so does the unease around its edges, until it becomes hard to say which story is the more dangerous.

Sulari Gentill's The Woman in the Library is a clever, layered literary thriller — a book about the books we write and the people we let get too close. Twisty and metafictional, it turns the simple pleasures of a whodunit into a sly meditation on the power, and the peril, of storytelling itself.