Breakaway Books

Authored by Beatriz Williams, Karen White and Lauren Willig; Published November 2024; Mystery

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

It is really quite imperative that you approach The Author’s Guide to Murder with the right mindset. That is, you really can’t take it too seriously.

In The Author’s Guide to Murder, cozy mystery author Cassie, paranormal romance writer Kat, and historian/author Emma team up to take revenge on a famous male author who’s abused each of them in turn. To accomplish their goal, the three have to travel to an isolated castle in Scotland and pretend to be best friends, despite the fact that they can’t be more different. But when their mark ends up dead, they have to prove themselves innocent and the best way to do that—of course—is to find the murderer themselves. 

Cassie, Kat, and Emma are all portrayed as way over the top. They are parodies of themselves, and although it’s a little rocky to read at first, by the end, their eccentricities all make more sense, and they had definitely grown on me. These authors are products of what has been done to them by the literary world. I found Cassie the hardest to cope with—her entire personality is taken up by being a mother to six kids, which gets repeated ad nauseum—but even she is easier to bear once you know her whole backstory. The running gags (excessive plaid wearing, a piece of attire called “pantiboots”) are played up a lot, too, but I found myself laughing rather than cringing in annoyance at them. Embracing the humor of it all is the key to enjoying this one. The novel has nice romantic happy endings for its heroines and a pretty well-constructed mystery as well. 

The abusive male author is an over-the-top villain, as exaggerated as everything else. He is one-dimensional and so callously evil that truly, he cannot be real. (It is a little tiring to continuously read novels about how poorly men treat women, even when it is an accurate depiction of reality.) But the role he serves in this novel is as a foil to allow these three very different women to see each other as real people and build bonds despite their differences. The development of their friendship follows a predictable course, but it is an example of what real empathy and support can look like, too, even when the friend in question rubs you the wrong way and appears to be diametrically opposed to everything you stand for. This point about the power of friendship was probably hammered home a few too many times, a little too obviously—the novel does drag on just a tad longer than I wanted—but it’s a worthy point nonetheless.

I can’t recommend The Author’s Guide to Murder if you’re not ready to read a parody of Scotland, authors, and just about every popular literary genre. But as long as you’re up for the humor, you’ll love it!