Reviews with content warning for Gun violence - The Mystery Writer

Reviews tagging 'Gun violence'

The Mystery Writer by Sulari Gentill

12 reviews

kylieqrada's review

adventurous dark mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

I was so hyped to read this after The Woman in the Library, but it didn’t work for me, unfortunately. A lot of the elements were really intriguing to me, but the story as a whole, combined with a lack of copy editing, just wasn’t it.

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nicoyarose's review

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dark mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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mels_reading_log's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging emotional mysterious medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

All she wanted to do was move closer to her brother and try her hand at being a writer. But somehow she ended up inside of a murder mystery wilder than anything she could have wrote.

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raelle37's review against another edition

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mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

This book kept me engaged from beginning to end. Some of the twists were truly unexpected (even if the official summary is spoiler-ridden). The journey of an aspiring writer who has her world quickly implode around her will have you wondering who is behind everything and how all the threads weave together.

There are some moments of confusion or where characters act in ways that require you to really suspend your disbelief. The time skips toward the end felt a bit disjointed. Overall though, I was able to follow and stay engaged throughout.

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minimicropup's review against another edition

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adventurous dark emotional lighthearted tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? No
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

2.0

This book felt too long and mushed together too many ideas (many of which were great but could have used their own story). By 50%, I wanted to put it down and that feeling never went away.

Energy: Careless. Capricious. Shifty.

Scene: 🇺🇸 Set in Lawrence, Kansas

Perspective: We follow an Australian law student who dropped out of Uni and flew to America hoping to stay with their lawyer brother to work on a first novel. A chance meeting with a famous but controversial thriller writer leads to a mentorship (maybe more) but puts our main character in the spotlight after a gruesome murder.

🐺 Growls: Cartoony action scenes. Repetitive topics and musings. Too much ‘silliness’ in the storytelling style. Theo, her thoughts, her actions, her incompetency…her very being 😂

🐕 Howls: The synopsis is misleading and more of a B- or C-plot. Time jumping ‘lazy’ ending.

🐩 Tail Wags: The first half. Originality. Creative plot ideas. Conspiracy theory doomsday angle.

🤔 Random Thoughts:

Theo was the worst. I’m a sucker for unlikeable characters, but Theo felt like a convenient plot device with her unbelievable damsel-in-distress decisions. She was all inner monologues about how grateful she is for her brother keeping her safe...then she’d knowingly do the most banal idiotic crap, and her brother and his friend would have to rescue her by putting their lives in danger repeatedly. I wanted to push her aside and get to the other characters we were getting too little of.

There’s an escalation of stakes through action and chase, cat-and-mouse survival without knowing the connection or what is happening. Eventually, we know more ( it had a ‘that’s it?’ feel). I hated how we often found things out through repetitive dialogue. The kind where a character reveals something to another character. Then, that character tells the same thing to a different one and so on.

There’s a shift in style and tone halfway through. Whether you prefer the slow bizarro mystery from the first half or the wacky action adventure of the second half, you may feel a little ripped off by the ending. It all ends abruptly when we jump years in advance, switch character perspectives, and are told what has happened since. Like an extended epilogue but full of plot holes and unresolved subplots.

----

🎬 Tale-Telling: A little melodramatic and verbose (lots of dialogue and reflecting).

🤓 Reader Role: Overhearing from the sidelines and sometimes jumping deep into Theo’s mind.

🗺️ World-Building: Simple, a bit gritty, little moments of sensory immersion, but somehow still felt out of place.

🔥 Fuel: First, a murder mystery and figuring out what the bizarre online posts ahead of the chapters mean. Then it’s violence and explosions without context – on the run but not sure from who or why. It settles into wondering how everything will wrap up once we know some truths.

📖 Cred: Over-the-top silliness (not camp), suspended disbelief

🚙 Journey: Struggle chugging spinning wheels, ending in a bullet train blur.

Mood Reading Match-Up:

Gun shots. Squealing tires. Coffee. Breaking glass. Dog barking. Distant footsteps. Keys in the door.
Bizarro cozy mystery meets conspiracy theorist doomsday drama meets PG14 action-adventure

Content Heads-Up: Guns and gun violence. Sexual content (consenting; brief). Threats. Stalking. Medical (intensive care, life-saving procedures). Murder, dead bodies. Sexual assault. Blood.

Rep: Cisgender. Heterosexual. Dark/tan-skinned Australians and White Americans.

📚 Format: Library Digital

My musings 💖 powered by puppy snuggles 🐶

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liblibby's review

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adventurous mysterious tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.75

I really like this author's works--I LOVED The Woman in the Library and I might even have liked this one more than that if it weren't for all the... tedious inaccuracies that I kept catching throughout the piece. It's so important to get a reader from the place where you're going to set your book if you're not terribly familiar with it.

It felt like there was a lot of research done to determine, say, the names of streets and certain landmark businesses in Lawrence, KS. But then other basic things were really overlooked. For example, an American would never say "I just got out of hospital." They'd say, "I just got out of the hospital." I know it's small but it really sounds strange to an American ear. Also, there's no such thing as the Kansas Police Department. Here, it's the [City] Police Department (so, in this case, Lawrence Police Department) or the [State} Bureau of Investigation (Kansas Bureau of Investigation).

Like I said, the story was great but I, personally, really struggled to stick with the story when I kept getting distracted by these little things.

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