As I did not finish this book, I have not rated it, as that wouldn’t be fair at all.
I am not a huge fan of the recent meta-fiction landslide. It’s all very clever, but does it make for an enjoyable book to read? Sometimes it does, but often it doesn’t. By page 70 I was beginning to lose the plot, so to speak!
One character (real or fictional, I cannot remember) explains the story as ‘an exploration of an author’s relationship with her protagonist, an examination of the tenuous line between belief and reality, imagination and self, and what happens when that line is crossed’. It just left me confused.
I loved Gentill’s Woman in the Library, and the Rowland Sinclair series, so I am hoping this is just a one-off exploration of this style of writing.

What’s not to like? A story within a story all about writing a book about a murder in the Boston Public Library. Libraries; murders; literary references galore; and plenty of twists and turns to keep you guessing until the end.
This was a great book to listen to, with a different narrator reading the correspondence from the creepy Leo.

I listened to this as an audio book and it was a lot of fun. Set in 1932 it moves from a luxury cruise liner to New York and finally to Sydney. The main character, Rowland Sinclair is an appealing man who cannot resist poking his nose in where it is least wanted. HIs is a life of privilege, affording him the luxury of pleasing himself most of the time. He is an artist and rubs shoulders with bohemian society, counting Norman Lindsay amongst his friends. This series has much in common with Kerry Greenwood’s Miss Phryne Fisher series.
I will read Book 1 now (this is book 2) and then continue to dip into the series when I feel in need of an entertaining read, with appealing characters, murders that aren’t too gruesome, and a mystery that engages.