I’m sure there are people tired of reading books set in the literary world, but I’m not one of them. Give me a romance about a bookstore owner and a self-published author, a literary novel about a literary novelist—but most of all give me a mystery about an editor searching for her dead author’s missing manuscript or a bunch of writers stranded at a remote castle while on a fellowship. Fortunately, there have been plenty of literary mysteries to feed my requirements recently; here are a few of them.
How To Write a Murder by Jessica Brody (Bantam, Sept. 22): This metafictional mystery manages to cram everything into its 560 pages: a writers’ conference in a California monastery, a keynote speaker who’s embezzling money from his agent, a sudden storm, a power outage, a dead body in the pool. Our review calls this “a gleeful demonstration of the universally acknowledged truth that ‘if anyone can get away with murder, it’s a writer.’”
How To Kill a Crime Writer by Sarah Lotz (Berkley, July 21): When crime novelist Annie Morrissey falls off a ladder and dies, her estranged daughter, Niamh, is mourning the lost chance to reconcile. Then Annie’s fictional detective, Leah Rebecca Overton, shows up and tells Niamh she thinks the whole ladder thing smells fishy. Niamh has always been jealous of Leah, whom her mother described as “chic, tall, and athletic,” but she admits that the detective might be right. Some of Annie’s neighbors, as well as plenty of publishing people, had a motive to get Annie out of the way. Our review calls this “an absorbing murder mystery with a unique twist and a poignant look at grief.”
The Novel Detective by Teresa Dovalpage (Soho Crime, July 14): The author is a Cuban-born mystery writer who lives in New Mexico; her protagonist is Teresa, a New Mexico mystery writer who’s always wanted to be a detective and is haunted by the deaths of two classmates when she was a teenager in Cuba. She returns to Havana in 2020 with a childhood friend to investigate; the story moves back and forth between past and present and involves Teresa’s mother, a pharmacist; missing pills; a creepy English teacher; and more. Our review calls it “a fascinating look at life in Cuba cleverly intertwined with a series of puzzles the protagonist is desperate to solve.”
We Chase Shadows by Richard Osman (Pamela Dorman/Viking, Sept. 15): Only one of the three friends who run the titular detective agency is a writer, but what a writer she is: Rosie D’Antonio, the Jackie Collins-esque private plane-flying author of And the Devil Blinked First, among other bonkers bestsellers. This time around, Rosie, Steve, and Amy are trying to figure out who killed the bodyguard of a guy who sells counterfeit vitamins all over Europe. Even though he hired them, he doesn’t seem to really want them doing anything. Our review says, “It’s fun to watch Amy and Steve try to fit into Rosie’s glamorous world: ‘Amy has never been to a book launch before—I mean, who on earth has?’” Plenty of detectives, it seems.
Laurie Muchnick is the fiction editor.
