Cleaning up messes

British author Phaedra Patrick has a gift for writing stories about characters discovering the unknown in their own history or in the history of someone they love. She did this in novels like The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper and The Library of Lost and Found, and she does it again in The Messy Lives of Book People (2022).

Liv Green, a woman in her 40s with two sons in college, works as a cleaning lady for a famous novelist, Essie Starling. She once aspired to become a writer herself, but she has settled for working for one and reading every one of Essie's bestsellers over and over again. Her husband, Jake, is part of a family that owns a book publishing business.

Essie's sudden death comes as a shock. An even bigger shock comes when Liv is told that Essie, fearing her death, had declared that Liv should finish writing her 20th novel. She is given six months, until Nov. 1, to complete the task. And not until that day will Essie's death be announced to the world.

Liv recognizes that Essie's main character, Georgia Rory, represents Essie herself. To properly complete the series of novels, she feels she must dig into Essie's past and and try to discover the identity of her one true love.

Discovery follows discovery as she researches Essie's history, which shockingly intersects with her own history. The mystery of why Essie chose her cleaning lady, of all people, to complete her final novel becomes clear at last.

Liv must keep her work a secret, even from Jake, and this puts a strain on their marriage. The fact that her research puts her in close contact with Essie's attractive former lovers doesn't help her home life. Thus things do get messy for these book people. But Liv is a cleaning lady, or now a former cleaning lady, and she knows something about cleaning up messes.