HOT GIRL MURDER CLUB

Murder and mayhem among the leggy glitterati of Los Angeles.

Like Winstead’s previous novel, The Future Saints (2026), her latest revolves around a sultry songwriter with a dead teenage sister, but this time foul play is involved, resulting in a thriller rather than a romance. The lineaments of this story are so patently absurd that just a slight shift in tone would have made for great comic crime, but unfortunately there seems to be no tongue in cheek here. And yet somehow Winstead’s police detective, Grey Holloway, is a picture-perfect beauty who supplements her day job by working as a bottle-service girl at a trendy nightclub. As we meet her, Det. Holloway has been called on to investigate the murder of a celebrity-adjacent character who weirdly—and for no reason we ever learn—could have been her identical twin. On the wall next to the victim, written in blood, is a lyric from the work of singer-songwriter Scout Sage: “I eat traitors for breakfast.” Is this message meant to implicate Scout? Could be, since she and 30 of her closest friends are part of a network they call "Ladies of the Dark," aka the Hot Girl Murder Club, the focus of media coverage, a Saturday Night Live sketch, a national movement of supporters who love the idea of murder as a reaction to #MeToo violations, and a very unacademic-sounding Ph.D. dissertation excerpted throughout the book. Many more dead bodies pile up in both flashbacks and the novel’s present. Some of the book’s finer prose moments include a naysayer’s characterization of Scout and her sister as “talentless, no-pedigree girls from disgusting New Jersey”; a journalist’s description of her discovery of “Scout’s Rosebud, her raison d’être, her ikigai”; and the presentation of a theory that “women are experiencing a period of sped-up evolution. Scientists call it epigenetics, phases of heightened transformation, when an entire subset of people mutate quickly to respond to the demands of their environment.” Do they now.

You have to laugh.