JUST ANOTHER DEAD AUTHOR

Bivald offers a murder mystery, a travel book, and a writing tutorial all rolled into one.

Junior agent Sally Marsch neatly sums up the vicious circle writers face: If their sales slump, they look for ways to freshen their writing. But to offset falling revenues, their publishers ask them to produce more books on shorter timelines, giving them less time to develop work that’s more innovative. Bivald confronts this dilemma in her tale about Emma Scott’s writing retreat, designed to bring aspiring writers together with veteran authors, agents, and publishers at Château de Livres in the scenic French countryside so they can develop the craft that for some borders on obsession. Bivald shows ingenuity by livening an old chestnut—the murder of a thoroughly disagreeable established professional at a gathering of colleagues who hate him—by demonstrating techniques they teach (such as how to create memorable characters) at appropriate times in her own narrative. Where she fails is in follow-through. No sooner does veteran author Berit Gardner lecture on dramatic plot twists than Bivald lands a whopper of her own. But she quickly abandons both of the characters most affected by the revelation, begging the reader to ask, “What was the point?” She also ignores her own dictum that good writers show rather than tell what their characters think and feel. She describes almost no mentoring between teachers and their students, although some manage to produce sellable projects anyway. One wonders how.

The title says it all.