William Morrow
Featuring: Emma Endicott; Cassie Pringle; Kat de Noir
416 pages ISBN: 0063259869 EAN: 9780063259867 Kindle: B0CV7SJ7QX Hardcover / e-Book / audiobook Add to Wish List
Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig & Karen White, dubbed Team W, have collaborated on a number of delightful historical fiction books that I have gobbled up with glee, and are almost always my choice when it’s my turn to choose a book for my book club to read. THE AUTHOR'S GUIDE TO MURDER is a decided change from their usual captivating fare. Rather than their elegantly researched and presented historical stories, THE AUTHOR'S GUIDE TO MURDER is a decidedly tongue-in-cheek satire of the literary world and has a wacky cozy murder mystery at its core.
After the locked room murder of a supposed literary superstar at a writing conference in a remote Scotland castle, three American authors reluctantly join forces to clear their names and uncover the real killer. The so-called superstar is a creep of the first order, and everyone rightfully wanted him dead. The local detective inspector has a plethora of suspects to dig through. One of the fun constructs at the beginning of the book is the start of each chapter with a segment of a police interview with a different author, giving us information in dribs and drabs. Sadly, the reader loses this enjoyable element in the early part of the book.
The story is told from the alternating viewpoints of each of the three American authors. We have the housewifely mother-of-six who writes cozy mysteries. There’s the threadbare and uptight New Englander who writes detailed historical fiction with massive footnotes. And there’s the vampy erotica author with a jaded heart and a snarky attitude. These characters are such caricatures that I found them a bit off-putting. By the time the reader gets to know their backstories, I already disliked them so much that their personal histories did not make them any more sympathetic as characters to me.
The zany tale has lots of over-the-top elements that feel very absurdly exaggerated. There are also plenty of self-referential elements that were probably a lot of fun for the authors to include, but often left me shaking my head. The authors apologize to Scotland in their Authors’ Note, and that’s probably good given the many sheep jokes and other Scottish stereotypes that they overemploy.
THE AUTHOR'S GUIDE TO MURDER is a book that aims for a wacky campy feel but instead delivers an awkward mélange of cliches and inside jokes. Williams, Willig & White typically deliver lyrical plush tales that I adore, and I look forward to more of their typical fare in the future.
Agatha Christie meets Murder, She Wrote in this witty locked room mystery and literary satire by New York Times bestselling team of novelists: Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, and Karen White.
There’s been a sensational murder at historic Castle Kinloch, a gothic fantasy of grey granite on a remote island in the Highlands of Scotland. Literary superstar Brett Saffron Presley has been found dead—under bizarre circumstances—in the castle tower’s book-lined study. Years ago, Presley purchased the castle as a showpiece for his brand and to lure paying guests with a taste for writerly glamour. Now it seems, the castle has done him in…or, possibly, one of the castle’s guests has. Detective Chief Inspector Euan McIntosh, a local with no love for this literary American show-off (or Americans in general), finds himself with the unenviable task of extracting statements from three American lady novelists.
The prime suspects are Kat de Noir, a slinky, sexy erotica writer; Cassie Pringle, a Southern mom of six juggling multiple cozy mystery series; and Emma Endicott, a New England blue blood and author of critically acclaimed historical fiction. The women claim to be best friends writing a book together: a historical novel about the castle’s lurid past and its debauched laird, who himself ended up creatively murdered. But the authors’ stories about how they know Brett Saffron Presley don’t quite line up, and the detective is getting increasingly suspicious.
Why did the authors really come to Castle Kinloch? Is the murder of the long-ago laird somehow connected with the playboy author’s unfortunate demise? And what really happened the night of the great Kinloch ceilidh, when Brett Saffron Presley skipped the folk dancing for a rendezvous with death?
A crafty locked-room mystery, a pointed satire about the literary world, and a tale of unexpected friendship and romance—this novel has it all, as only three bestselling authors can tell it!
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