May Book Club: The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill
The Woman in the Library by Sulari Gentill
The premise sold me before I even turned the first page: four strangers happen to be sitting at the same table in the Boston Public Library when they hear a scream, and then find out a woman has been killed. What follows is everything that brought those four people to that table, everything they’re hiding, and a tangle of crimes that keeps expanding the longer you pull on the thread.
Gentill’s description of the Boston Public Library made me want to book a flight and find a corner table to sit in forever. Beautiful old libraries are one of my love languages.
I listened to this one on audiobook, which turned out to be the right call for me. (Although one of my friends said the narration was confusing, and she switched to the book which was easier for her.) The narrator did a great job shifting between voices, which helped me keep the characters sorted. Mostly.
Here’s my honest word for this book: convoluted. Under normal circumstances, if I’m that lost, I set it down and move on. Life is short and my TBR is not. But the mystery was genuinely compelling, and the characters were real enough and interesting enough to keep me pressing play even when I wasn’t sure who was fictional-within-the-story and who was actually real. (Two characters with the same name. Just… why.)
I arrived at in-person book club ready to ask, “Did anyone else understand what was happening?” I was not alone.
We were all over the place on guessing the murderer. One person had a quiet hunch early on but wasn’t totally sure; the rest of us were confidently, completely wrong. Leo’s letters were the turning point. Around chapter 14, when some unsettling details surfaced, we all quietly agreed that something was very off. (We just couldn’t pin down which something.)
The character we loved was the older woman in the building who looks out for the younger residents. Funny, warm, deserving of her own spinoff. The whole book has an Only Murders in the Building meets Inception energy. Unreliable people circle the same mystery while the story keeps folding back on itself and you’re never entirely sure which layer you’re in.
I also didn’t anticipate the pandemic showing up as a backdrop. Masks, restrictions, all of it woven into the setting as context rather than plot. I’ve been quietly avoiding pandemic-era fiction (lived it, didn’t need to revisit it) but Gentill uses it as atmosphere and it worked better than I expected.
Four stars on the story. Three and a half on the structure, because reading shouldn’t be that hard.
Kelly Brakenhoff is the author of 17 books and a seasoned ASL interpreter. She splits her writing energy between two series: cozy mysteries set on a college campus and children’s books featuring Duke the Deaf Dog.
In 2025, two of her children’s books were selected for the CBC Favorites Award Lists, honored by teachers and librarians nationwide for excellence in children’s literature. Parents, kids, and educators love the Duke the Deaf Dog books and activity guides because they introduce ASL and the Deaf community through engaging stories.
And if you enjoy a smart female sleuth, want to learn more about Deaf culture, or have lived in a place where livestock outnumber people, the Cassandra Sato Mystery series will have you connecting the dots faster than a group project thrown together the night before it’s due.
A proud mom to four adults, head of the dog-snuggling department, and grandma to a growing brood of perfectly behaved grandkids, Kelly and her husband call Nebraska home.