Book Review for The Author's Guide to Murder by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, Karen White

 

The Author's Guide to Murder by Beatriz Williams, Lauren Willig, Karen White

Published:  November 5, 2024 by William Morrow

Genre:  Cozy Mystery, Historical Fiction, Books About Books

 

Taken from Goodreads:  Agatha Christie meets Murder, She Wrote in this witty locked room mystery and literary satire by New York Times bestselling team of 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 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! 

 

My Thoughts:  I am a huge fan of all three authors separately.   Together they are just as entertaining.   This book is different than other’s I have read by them.   I did not find myself as enthralled to read it.  I wanted to love it, but I just did not.   I would like to listen to it in audiobook form and see if I enjoy it more. 

I liked the uniqueness of the setting and characters.   They are the quirkiest characters I have ever read of.   The three authors were so odd.   They talked in circles, they went behind each other’s backs, and they all had huge secrets about their reason for wanting to write this book together.   I liked trying to figure out why each author wanted to write but the clues were hard to come by for me.  

I enjoyed The Author’s Guide to Murder but I did not feel that it was a wonderful book that I would recommend over and over again.   If you love these authors as I do, pick up your own copy and make your own judgement.    Each book has its readers, you might be this books reader.  

Thank you William Morrow for a copy of the book in exchange for my honest review.

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Meet BeatrizWilliams (taken from her website):  Beatriz Williams is the New York Times, USA Today, and internationally bestselling author of Our Woman in Moscow, The Summer Wives, Her Last Flight, The Golden Hour, The Secret Life of Violet Grant, A Hundred Summers, and several other works of historical fiction, including four novels in collaboration with fellow bestselling authors Karen White and Lauren Willig. A graduate of Stanford University with an MBA in Finance from Columbia University, Beatriz worked as a communications and corporate strategy consultant in New York and London before her first novel was published in 2012. Beatriz’s books have won numerous awards, have been translated into more than a dozen languages, and appear regularly in bestseller lists around the world.

Born in Seattle, Washington, Beatriz now lives near the Connecticut shore with her husband and four children, where she divides her time between writing and laundry.

 

Meet Lauren Willig(taken from her website):  Lauren Willig is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of more than twenty works of historical fiction, including Band of Sisters, The Summer Country, The English Wife, the RITA Award-winning Pink Carnation series, and four novels co-written with Beatriz Williams and Karen White. Her books have been translated into over twenty languages, picked for Book of the Month Club, awarded the RITA, Booksellers Best, and Golden Leaf awards, and chosen for the American Library Association’s annual list of the best genre fiction. An alumna of Yale University, she has a graduate degree in history from Harvard and a JD from Harvard Law School. She lives in New York City with her husband, two young children, and vast quantities of coffee.

Meet Karen White  (taken from her website):  Karen White is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of 34 books, including the Tradd Street series, The Last Night in London, Dreams of Falling, The Night the Lights Went Out, Flight Patterns, The Sound of Glass, and A Long Time Gone. She is the coauthor of The Lost Summers of Newport, All the Ways We Said Goodbye, The Glass Ocean and The Forgotten Room with New York Times bestselling authors Beatriz Williams and Lauren Willig. She grew up in London but now lives with her husband near Atlanta, Georgia.

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