When choosing what to review, I enjoy a good murder mystery or a thriller, but can also be partial to a puzzle or an escape game.

This thrilling excursion into metafiction from Australian author Gentill ( Crossing the Lines) wittily examines the writing process itself…This elegantly constructed novel is intelligent, funny, and profound. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Sulari Gentill is the author of the multi- award-winning Rowland Sinclair Mysteries, a series of (currently) ten historical crime novels set in 1930s Australia. The scream unites Freddie with the woman and two men sitting near her: they form a friendship but Hannah tells us right at the start that one of them is a murderer.Narrator Katherine Littrell delivers this twisty mystery set in and around the Boston Public Library. Fans of Sulari Gentill will no doubt be thrilled with this new novel, but those who have never read her before, like me, should be equally as thrilled to discover such an amazing literary talent.

It also ends rather abruptly, and with there being two characters named ‘Leo’ but who each work in different ways towards the two plots, the ending really left me adrift. Sheila Liming explores the connection between libraries and self-making in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American culture, from the 1860s to the 1930s. We have no budget for materials and our collections have grown through the sheer generosity of our users, members and supporters.She’s in Australia and the novel is set in the US, so Leo’s offering advice on relevance, language, and feasibility. It’s clever and absorbing, and I love it when an author does something innovative with their narrative like this.