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.
A century-old trunk has been dug up near the railway village of Sterfontein. Inside is the lost journal of Victorian author ElizabethTenant – and what appear to be the remains of a child. Michael, a university student recovering from a broken heart, is intriguedby what the journal describes: a scarlet curtain billowing above the desert, covering the entrance to another world. But thingsbecome even stranger when a line in the journal seems to be connected to Michael and his cosmologist mother, written ahundred years before their time. Without much to go on, Michael travels to the old Karoo hotel where Elizabeth wrote her novelMIRAGE. Amid talk of omens in the sky, ancient prophecies and the end of the world, he tries to decipher the journal’s secrets. Asone mystery leads to the next, constellation-like patterns between his own life and Elizabeth’s appear, helped along by Renata, aself-proclaimed medium, and Oom Sarel, the local museum curator. But as time starts to dissolve in the mirages of the Karoo, itbecomes more and more difficult to know what is real and what is not. And why can’t he shake the feeling that he’s been to thevillage before?
When a young woman, Sarah Connelly, is found murdered in her home in New York’s elite Sleepy Point suburb, it triggers questions about the neighbor who discovered the body, Audrey Hughes. This kind of attention is the last thing Audrey wants. Moving to Sleepy Point was supposed to provide her with a new, quiet start after a trauma left her with incurable blindness. But the other reason she settled next door to Sarah was to spy on her. Police scrutiny moves Audrey like a pawn on a chessboard from witness to suspect, after it’s revealed that she had a volatile argument with Sarah hours before her death. The deeper the police delve into the case, the murkier the truth becomes. As the book twists and turns through alternating points of view and timelines, a compelling and complex scheme emerges that threatens all involved . . . and the ticking clock of investigation collides with the explosive secrets Audrey and Sarah have been keeping.
Welcome to Spooky Time, the hit TV ghost hunting show where the horror is scripted…and the ratings are declining rapidly. What better way to up the stakes—and boost the viewership—than by locking a select group of Z-list celebrities up for the night in The Most Haunted Hall in England (TM) and live-streaming the « terrifying » results?
Since the morning after the party – the one Liv can’t remember, the one that left her covered in bruises – there’s been a padlock on the door of her bedroom. Her parents said they found mold and it needs to be decontaminated, but they’re acting kind of strange. And her friend Leilani isn’t answering her texts, so maybe Liv did get a little out of control that night. Sharing a room with her brother Cas for a while isn’t the end of the world, as long as he doesn’t tell their parents that she’s started sleepwalking. They’re already worried enough.