A delightful celebration of rom-coms, slasher flicks, and the women who love them.
Leading Lady or Final Girl? That’s the question in this delightful debut.
Film student Jamie Prescott is struggling with her dissertation—titled “All’s Fair in Love and Gore: The Intersection of Romantic Comedies and Slasher Films in the Late Twentieth and Early Twenty-First Centuries”—when her roommate and BFF, Laurie Hamilton, insists that she take a break and get ready for the singles event they’re supposed to attend. Jamie doesn’t expect she’ll meet the man of her dreams while speed dating at a club in Bed-Stuy, but she does her hair, spends some time choosing a good dress, and puts on a pair of heels, anyway. She really doesn’t expect she’ll spend the evening trapped in a locked-room murder mystery in which a knife-wielding psycho is picking off hopeful singles one by one. If she had, she probably would have chosen more sensible shoes. And maybe a dress with pockets. As the resident expert on horror tropes, Jamie serves as advisor to a dwindling company of surviving speed daters, while the coolheaded and obnoxiously good-looking (of course) Wes serves as leader. As the night progresses, though, Jamie starts to wonder if she’s working with the wrong tropes. What if this killer’s bloody spree is inspired by, say, Lloyd Dobler with the boombox, not Ghostface with the hunting knife (or Jason Voorhees with the machete, or Michael Myers with the kitchen knife, or Freddy Krueger with those knife fingers)? Jamie likes to call her more cerebral, less emotive bestie an “elitist piece of shit,” and Jamie’s creator is, herself, engaging in some fancy metatextual shenanigans here, but Thompson wears her smartypants well. She clearly understands not just the demands of genre but also its pleasures. Those who are familiar with romance and/or horror will have some guesses about how this narrative is going to turn out, but Thompson does an admirable job of keeping the reader guessing—and second-guessing—right up until the end.
A delightful celebration of rom-coms, slasher flicks, and the women who love them.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668206713
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2025
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.
A struggling writer finds an unexpected muse when a mysterious man shows up at her cabin.
Petra Rose used to pump out a bestselling book every six months, but then the adaptation happened—that is, the disastrous film adaptation of her most famous book. The movie changed the book’s storyline so egregiously that fans couldn’t forgive her, and the ensuing harassment sent Petra into hiding and gave her a serious case of writer’s block. Petra’s one hope is her solo writing retreat at a remote cabin, where she can escape the distractions of real life and focus on her next book, a story about a woman having an affair with a cop. When officer Nathaniel Saint shows up at her cabin door, inspiration comes flooding back. Much like the character from Petra’s book, Saint is married, and he’s willing to be Petra’s muse, helping her get into her characters’ heads. Petra’s book is practically writing itself, but is the game she’s playing a little too dangerous? Does she know when to stop—and, more importantly, is Saint willing to stop? Hoover is no stranger to controversial movie adaptations and internet backlash, but she clarifies in a note to readers that she’s “just a writer writing about a writer” and that no further connections to her own life are contained in these pages—which is a good thing, because the book takes some horrifying twists and turns. Petra finds herself inexplicably attracted to Saint, even as she describes him as “such an asshole,” and her feelings for him veer between love and hate. The novel serves as a meta commentary on the dark romance genre—as Petra puts it, “Even though, as readers, we wouldn’t want to live out some of the fantasies we read about, it doesn’t mean we don’t enjoy reading those things.”
A dark and twisty look at just how far one woman is willing to go to find inspiration.Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2026
ISBN: 9781662539374
Page Count: -
Publisher: Montlake
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2025
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.
After being released from prison, a young woman tries to reconnect with her 5-year-old daughter despite having killed the girl’s father.
Kenna didn’t even know she was pregnant until after she was sent to prison for murdering her boyfriend, Scotty. When her baby girl, Diem, was born, she was forced to give custody to Scotty’s parents. Now that she’s been released, Kenna is intent on getting to know her daughter, but Scotty’s parents won’t give her a chance to tell them what really happened the night their son died. Instead, they file a restraining order preventing Kenna from so much as introducing herself to Diem. Handsome, self-assured Ledger, who was Scotty’s best friend, is another key adult in Diem’s life. He’s helping her grandparents raise her, and he too blames Kenna for Scotty’s death. Even so, there’s something about her that haunts him. Kenna feels the pull, too, and seems to be seeking Ledger out despite his judgmental behavior. As Ledger gets to know Kenna and acknowledges his attraction to her, he begins to wonder if maybe he and Scotty’s parents have judged her unfairly. Even so, Ledger is afraid that if he surrenders to his feelings, Scotty’s parents will kick him out of Diem’s life. As Kenna and Ledger continue to mourn for Scotty, they also grieve the future they cannot have with each other. Told alternatively from Kenna’s and Ledger’s perspectives, the story explores the myriad ways in which snap judgments based on partial information can derail people’s lives. Built on a foundation of death and grief, this story has an undercurrent of sadness. As usual, however, the author has created compelling characters who are magnetic and sympathetic enough to pull readers in. In addition to grief, the novel also deftly explores complex issues such as guilt, self-doubt, redemption, and forgiveness.
With captivating dialogue, angst-y characters, and a couple of steamy sex scenes, Hoover has done it again.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5420-2560-7
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
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