Notes from the Shelf

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The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill is a 292-page mystery novel set in the Boston Public Library. The library is quiet until it’s shattered by a woman’s piercing scream. Security guards tell everyone to stay put until they investigate the origins of the scream. While waiting, four strangers who happened to sit at the same table pass the time with conversation. Each has his or her own reason for being in the library that morning, but what they don’t know is one is a murderer.

I thought this book had a lot of potential, but it fell a little flat for me. There were a lot of grammatical mistakes that took me out of the story. It’s very distracting for me when there are so many errors. I did read the e-book version so maybe it was a different version than in print, but it just seemed like it hadn’t been edited at all.

I thought the story overall was good. It took a while to piece together who the killer was, so I liked that it wasn’t immediately obvious. Also, after every chapter there’s a letter from a friend, as if the author has sent the previous chapter to a friend for feedback, so I did think that was an interesting element to the story. I haven’t seen that too much in other books.

I wish there was more to those letters. As the story progressed, the letters became more unsettling, but then it was just kind of glossed over at the end, left for the reader to piece together what happened. I wish there had been more details and a solid conclusion to that storyline because I almost found it more interesting that the main story. The book was pretty short, too, so I think there could’ve been more added to the letters.

Overall, I give The Woman in the Library 3 stars.

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