Knives Out meets Murder, She Wrote meets #MeToo in this witty locked room mystery and literary satire by New York Times bestselling team of novelists: Karen White, Lauren Willig and Beatriz Williams.

THE AUTHOR’S GUIDE TO MURDER
by Karen White, Beatriz Williams, and Lauren Willig
William Morrow, November 2024
(via Writers House)

There’s been a sensational murder at historic Castle Kinloch, a gothic fantasy of a 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 together: 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 the 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!

“A trio of historical fiction icons” (Chicago Tribune), Team W is comprised of bestselling authors Karen White, Beatriz Williams, and Lauren Willig. They have written four novels together, with their most recent collaboration being the New York Times bestseller The Lost Summers of Newport, for which rights were sold in Hungary to XXI Szazad.