At the heart of Susie Dent's contemporary mystery masterpiece, Guilty by Definition, lies the unfinished story of the Thornhill sisters, two academically gifted women with opposing temperaments and a shared passion for the written word. The eldest, Charlotte, went missing more than a decade ago from her family home in Oxford, England, while working on her PhD. Her case remains unsolved. Charlie, as she was known, was gorgeous and charismatic in an intimidating, sometimes cruel way; her shy younger sibling, Martha, languished in the shadow of her sister's brilliance. The radiating energy of Charlie's "living absence" haunts the pages of Dent's marvelous novel as her fate comes clearly into focus.
The story opens one spring with Martha, now in her mid-30s, returning to Oxford after a decade abroad in Berlin. She fled her hometown after Charlie disappeared--it was too painful to remain--but now she is back as the newly appointed senior editor of the Clarendon English Dictionary, with a talented team of lexicographers under her supervision. Soon after she joins the CED, anonymous letters containing perplexing riddles and Shakespearean clues begin arriving at the dictionary office. While the missing Charlie is the apparent focus of the letters, they also allude to an ancient manuscript that, if it exists, will spark a global literary sensation. It's an intriguing and irresistible premise set against the enchanting backdrop of Oxford's "obligingly dreamy" architecture.
Dent (Word Perfect; Dent's Modern Tribes), a renowned English lexicographer and etymologist, is the popular, longstanding resident word expert on the British television show Countdown and has authored a number of books on the English language. Her first novel captures the seductive power of the written word, bound up as it is with history, cultural meaning and literary references, its ability to encapsulate a time and place long gone. Intimately familiar with Oxford, she is a guide through its "twisting cobbled alleyways" and the fascinating inner workings of the CED, modeled on Dent's prior employer the Oxford University Press. This is where Martha and her team record new words that come into existence and document the evolution of existing words.
Readers with a fondness for word games will have a splendid time trying to decipher the cleverly confounding clues and the letter writer's identity in the excellent company of Martha and her three colleagues, who share a passion for etymological challenges and obscure literary references. There's Simon, senior to Martha in tenure, who was passed over for the senior editor position and wears bright patterned shirts to the office. Alex is a brilliant woman, older than Martha, with an exquisite sense of style and a secretive life outside the office. The youngest lexicographer is the quick-witted Safi, known for her bright outfits, her fierce intellect, and her impressive mastery of the finicky printer. All are pulled together by Martha, whose gentle pre-Raphaelite beauty contrasts with her absent-minded fashion sense and the Doc Martens she pairs with her dresses. Her team is accustomed to receiving the odd "Shakespearean crank letter" now and again, but the new anonymous correspondence portends something more serious and casts an unsettling pall over the office, especially when the lexicographers start receiving cryptic postcards at their home addresses.
As Martha reacquaints herself with favorite Oxford haunts, she must also confront relationships that she has neglected, especially with her widower father, who resents Martha as though she is to blame for Charlie's disappearance. Echoes from the past are everywhere, urging her to find Charlie or discover her fate, reminding Martha of the role she fears she played in her sister's disappearance.
Fueled by Safi's crackling enthusiasm, Martha and her colleagues begin in earnest to decipher the anonymous letters as they gather in the office and in a 14th-century pub tucked into an ancient courtyard. Their investigation takes them to the Cheshire Cat Antiquarian Bookshop in the Cotswolds and a manor house in Oxfordshire Charlie had visited. Martha enlists the help of Detective Oliver Caldwell, convincing him to reopen Charlie's case, and she asks the pompous Shakespearean scholar Jonathan Overton--handsome, beautifully dressed, and disagreeable--for help deciphering the letters' mind-boggling clues. Dent's skillfully executed plot holds multiple layers of tension, including the relationship dynamics of a tight-knit yet secretive literary community. Not everyone is thrilled that the case is reopened, and it soon becomes frighteningly clear why.
Part of Guilty by Definition's charm lies in discovering, alongside Martha, Simon, Alex, and Safi, intriguing lost words. Each chapter is headed by a forgotten word from past centuries: the noun "velleity," for example, from the 17th century, means "the act of wishing or desiring without any accompanying effort"; the marvelous 16th-century word "addubitation" means "a suggestion of doubt."
Swirling with themes of sibling rivalry, greed and ambition, the novel's action accelerates as clues contained in the letters give way to newly uncovered truths and lead to a heart-pounding, spectacular finale. The mysteries at the center of the drama--Charlie's whereabouts and what she was hiding, Martha's guilt, the identity of the letter writer--find resolution in a series of unexpected yet ingenious plot twists that will take readers utterly by surprise. --Shahina Piyarali