What a fabulous new re-working of the thriller concept – a missing person mystery set in a lexicographical publishing house. With cryptic messages, word puzzles, regular references to the world’s literary greats and the creation of two intriguing female characters, ‘Guilty by Definition’ has much to offer!
The leading female character is lexicographer Martha Thornhill who returns to a UK publishing position after several years spent abroad. She has never recovered from the disappearance, almost fifteen years earlier of her much-admired older sister Charlie, so when an anonymous letter holding a series of oblique clues arrives at her new place of work, Martha and her fellow editors set out to investigate. That in the course of this amateur investigation, we learn much more about the complex sisterly relationship, the motives of the ancillary characters, and the English language ourselves, is a given – and Susie Dent takes us on genuinely enjoyable, brilliantly described journey. Highly recommended, I hope this unique thriller gains as many readers as possible. I wish to thank Bonnier Books UK, Zaffre and NetGalley for the e-ARC I was gifted in exchange for an honest review.

I was always going to be biased on this one, Susie Dent was my hero growing up, I wanted to be everything she was.

Not at all shocked to read this and love it, seeing how brilliant she has always been with words! This is everything I wanted it to be.

I must admit that I’m really disappointed by this! The overall reviews are fantastic so I’m not sure if it’s maybe just me, but I found this so slow and arduous to get through!

The story is a whodunnit/mystery with a difference - lots of words you’ll need to look up or else are shoe-horned in with the definition - either way I felt like I’d forgotten what was going on by the time we got back to the plot. Thankfully I was reading on my kindle which could give me definitions of words quickly but it still halted the flow several times.

The plot centres around Martha - a woman in her early 30s who has fairly recently returned to live in her hometown of Oxford after living in Berlin. She is working as a dictionary editor at the offices where her older sister Charlie briefly worked before going missing 10 years ago - and still no one knows what happened to her.

One day a mysterious letter arrives at the dictionary from someone known as Chorus - it is a baffling and long letter that makes no sense to the reader but the dictionary team have it worked out in a surprisingly short time. Next, people connected to Charlie start receiving postcards with puzzling messages on them.

Now Martha and her team throw any semblance of doing any work aside for what feels like weeks or months and concentrate on solving the mystery of Charlie’s disappearance and Chorus’s lengthy and impossible riddles (which they repeatedly solve quickly without too much trouble).

I love a good mystery and whodunnit but this just didn’t do it for me- it was slow, the characters unappealing except for Zoe, and Alex was ok, and I felt like I wasn’t too bothered what had happened to Charlie by the end. Disappointing!

I was excited to receive an arc of the debut novel by the popular lexicographer and tv presenter Susie Dent. However, although I liked the premise, the narrative was slow and the setting of Oxford has been over explored.

This is a DNF for me. Whilst it is very well written I have found it a little slow going and I struggled to comprehend the story line! I may pick this up again in future

Susie Dent is known to may as a consultant on Countdown and to a lesser number as editor of Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable. Her debut novel centres around the disappearance of a young woman years ago. The missing woman's sister is now a team leader on the clarendon English Dictionary and a series of anonymous letters begin to arrive, with cryptic clues about the disappearance. The group of lexicographers begins to solve the puzzle. Its a good detective story and if you love unusual words, crossword puzzles and are interested in etymology and literary allusions you will love this book.. I couldn't put it down - its brilliant!

As an ex teacher I am very conscious of the use of words. Words fascinate me, and this book had so much to 'teach' me. It's a mystery bound up in the clever use of the surroundings, and the story of Martha. It took concentration to read, but I found it a very enjoyable story. Thanks for the chance to read and review the book.

Susie Dent is probably the country's most famous lexicographer and I was excited to read her debut novel.
It is set in the intellectual capital of the UK - Oxford and revolves around the team at the Clarendon English Dictionary, and a disappearance that hasn't been solved in over a decade.
It took me a long time to get into the story, mostly I think because I didn't really care very much about the main character Martha. Her sister Charlie had just vanished a long time before, and when Martha returns to Oxford to try and lay some ghosts to rest, everything ends up coming back to haunt her anyway.
I did really like the team at the CED and felt that their characters were very well drawn. Susie's word knowledge is exemplary but sometimes it felt a little forced including what a word meant in a certain description at so many different points in the book. I'm an English teacher, so words and meanings are really important to me but maybe it was just a little too often and stopped the flow of the plot.
Having said all that, the mystery was interesting and the resolution was relatively satisfying - no spoilers!

Overall, a 3.5 rounded up to a 4.
Many thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for an advanced released copy in exchange for an honest review.

ADVANCED REVIEW COPY - NETGALLEY

Suzy Dent and I have been involved for over thirty years...well, she's oblivious to it but as part of the Countdown team she's been a regular afternoon presence in various lounges and sitting rooms throughout that time...we also live in relative proximity in Oxfordshire I believe...she uses her knowledge of Oxford to great effect in this, her first published work of fiction.

As the mistress of dictionary corner she has spent decades sharing her wisdom and knowledge of the English language, words and their derivation as a staple of the ever entertaining programme.

Her word-smithery is put to good effect here from the opening chapter which introduces us to a cast of oddballs, drawn together by their common love of language as Editors of the fictional "Clarendon English Dictionary". My advanced review copy is downloaded to my Kindle, Ms Dent has managed to beat the inbuilt dictionary more than once (an early favourite for me is Chapter Four's "conjobble", which a character describes as being an opportunity to "eat,drink and talk" - that's one I'll be coming back to on many pub nights to come).

A tenth of the way in and we have the outline of the mystery that is to come - it's been an entertaining start , though part of me thinks that the all too clever wordplay is going to start clogging the narrative - no one likes a show off or a know-it-all I was taught...Suzy could annoy some readers by rubbing their noses into their general ignorance - though I'm sure she could equally enrapture others who are beguiled by the challenge of the unknown and new...At this point I'm hoping that the story will take over and distract me from the cleverness - which I can then return to at my leisure perhaps (or cast asunder in favour perhaps of a "less is more" approach next time?

Well what do I know, three days later and I've finished the book...yes, Suzy is clever with words and has a vocabulary way bigger than mine but that's my problem, not hers...the story did take over and what an excellent read it was. There are twists and turns to the very end, and there is an end with everything neat and tidy.

Excellent debut, let's hope it's the first of many.

This had me up all night! I was on the edge of my seat from start to finish, a fantastic plot and perfectly executed! Will definitely read more from this author! Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my ARC

I was never not going to read a crime novel by Susie Dent and this didn’t disappoint. You get exactly what you are hoping for; a well-plotted, well-delivered murder mystery dressed in detail about language, words, definitions, dictionaries and history. Looking forward to the next one already.

What a great debut loved the mystery/crime elements it has secrets puzzles and more I don’t what to give to much spoilers loved the characters 4 stars thank you NetGalley and Bonnier Books UK for the arc

What a great read this was! Susie Dent who is known for her love of words (and one of the few remaining good accounts on twitter/x) has delivered a mystery with puzzles, history, wit, words, words, more words and a bit of Shakespeare.

We meet Martha who is a senior editor is a dictionary publishing house. Her sister disappeared 10 years ago. At her new job, the staff begin to receive cryptic postcards and messages which they soon realise are related to the mystery of her disappearance.

Flawed characters, unlikeable characters and old school policemen feature in this Agatha-esque story.

I'm clearly not as good with words as Susie! Have a dictionary to hand

Once I got over the fact that I didn't know every word (and it was ruining the flow of the story to keep looking every one up!), I did enjoy this book, which was a different genre for me. As the author is Susie Dent, I always knew there would be a lot of words I was not likely to know (even though I would say I am fairly educated!) but I still wanted to read this. A really good, well constructed mystery based in the lovely city of Oxford. A great team of characters and I loved how they worked together to solve all the clues presented to them. I was a little concerned that it wasn't going to answer all the questions I had, but it all came together really nicely in the end. Highly recommended.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publishers for allowing me to read this in exchange for an honest review, which I have given.

This book unfortunately didn't work for me. I'm well aware of who Susie is, so I was expecting quite a few big words in this book. But there are just far too many, to the point where it's alienating.

The book is also pretty "tell, not show" and that felt a little too clunky to read.

Overall, sadly not for me.

This is a crime book that also educates you. I’m a big fan of the author’s writing, turning eagerly to the back of my Saga magazine each month. Perhaps for someone who doesn’t enjoy learning about how and where words are formed, this book may not be an easy read. Personally, I loved it!

Ok I realise this is the first novel written by Susie Dent who is by all accounts a lexicographer, but I was expecting just that, a novel, not what reads in some parts as a dictionary! I know the story evolves around the staff at a dictionary office, but for me there were too many attempts to educate the reader and I almost gave up reading it. However, I am glad I persevered because as the story progressed it turned into an intriguing mystery.
A good read just an over abundance of lexicographical references for me.

This is a very verbose book, given the author & the subject it was always going to be. However it did spoil the flow for me. An excellent book for the right audience.

So Susie Dent has joined the long list of people famous mostly for TV appearances who have branched out into writing crime novels. Of those I have read, I have to say that this is not among the most successful but this book had to overcome not only my prejudice against amateur attempts at a genre which is difficult for even accomplished authors to do well but also my prejudice against crime novels set in Oxford (where I have lived for many years), also difficult to pull off successfully (who has done it well, you ask? Colin Dexter, of course; P D James; Iain Pears; Mick Herron; and most recently Simon Mason).

I really did try to set aside my prejudices but for me the book started badly by succumbing to the cliche Oxford - "buttery stone" and the inevitable dreamy spires. However we are plunged into the world of lexicography which Susie of course knows well and we do indeed get some incidental insights into the painstaking and scholarly work that goes into making dictionaries. We also get lots of unusual words. Rather too many for me but others may relish them.

Sadly we also get a parade of two dimensional characters - the standard arrogant senior man and the plucky young women in his thrall but who eventually spell out his downfall. The plot is pedestrian with a slight but generally unsatisfying twist at the end. A big disappointment for me was in the literary clues provided for the lay sleuths to follow. A complex mix of literary references and cryptic crossword clues, leading to some very stilted dialogue between the lexicographers to ensure that readers could keep up with how they worked them out. (I marvelled at how quickly they could write quite long sections of text on whiteboards.)

Now I understand that I read a proof copy and there will, I hope, be some final editing but given the author I was somewhat surprised to encounter a description of a desk being "prised into" a space (OED: prise = to force up or out). And can an inbox "salt up" with enquiries? (probably a misprint for silt.)

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

I really wanted to love this book but I must admit I found it slow going to begin with and quite hard work at times. Obviously Susie demonstrates her lexicographical skills a great deal (loved the addition of her favourite word, apricity, which I heard about on a podcast she did!) and the clues from chorus were impossible for me to solve. Once the story got going and I had warmed to the characters I did find myself more involved and was glad to have the mystery solved by the end. I was also genuinely intrigued by the idea of Shakespeare’s sister’s book and what it would mean to the world. I felt I learned something and I was entertained, but not quite 5 stars yet, maybe the next one will be!