So there was two storylines going on then. Look I think contrast is what really makes something suspenseful. And one of the things I love about the book is even though it's about murder, the world you've written is very inviting. NADWORNY: 'The Woman In The Library' is set in Boston, Mass., and it takes place as the weather is turning cold, which means that the four characters, there's a lot of scenes where they're cooking warm dinners together, ordering takeout, making lots of hot coffee. And so it seemed to me that putting people in the same room and letting them experience something as heartrending as a disembodied scream might start a friendship which otherwise would not have happened.

And I think I was probably very cognizant of the idea that there was a sort of - a kind of a special bond that was built up by that shared distress. And there was three families living there. So we were evacuated, and I was at the time sitting in what I call the refugee house, which was a little house that was lent to the people who had been displaced. And I live in a town which was absolutely smashed by the bushfires. SULARI GENTILL: At the time I was writing this, of course, I was sitting in Australia in the middle of the bushfires. That's the premise of Sulari Gentill's new mystery, titled 'The Woman In The Library.' When I spoke with her this past week, she said the idea of strangers bonding during scary events came from her own life experience. Later, a body is found, and the four characters quickly become friends as they work to piece together what happened. Four strangers are sitting in the reading room of the Boston Public Library quietly working when a woman's scream pierces the silence.

The woman in the library sulari gentill