A fast-paced but sensitively told story set in the world of reality TV with an intriguing whodunit at its center.
Sterling presents a Hollywood mystery that focuses on the human costs of celebrity culture.
Critics and fans alike are unsurprised when the body of former child star Molly Mandrie is found hanging from a tree on L.A.’s Mulholland Drive. For 15 years, her chaotic existence has been on public display on her reality TV show, Molly’s Messy Life. She suffered through bad relationships and relapses of drug and alcohol addiction on the show, which featured a revolving cast of co-stars, many of whom would move on to headline their own reality shows. But to movie star Hector Espinoza, who was Molly’s devoted admirer, something about her suicide just doesn’t add up. He asks his old friend and current manager, Murphy Beck, to help him look into unanswered questions surrounding her death. For instance, why didn’t Molly leave a suicide note? And why didn’t Guy Maker, who was Molly’s longtime friend and her show’s executive producer, attend her funeral? Hector, who has a dark secret of his own, throws himself into solving the mystery: “He needed leads. He needed to talk to the people she knew best, who might have known Guy even better.” As he untangles the threads of Molly’s life, however, he finds that the world of reality TV is full of terrible secrets; everyone seems to seek fame and wealth at other people’s expense. In this skillfully written novel, the author (an L.A.-based writer and actor) thoroughly roots his story in a dysfunctional Hollywood culture that he seems to know well. Sterling richly describes the emotions and motivations of the major characters—mostly young men and women who live their lives constantly in front of cameras—with a strong sense of compassion. His story is clearly inspired by how the #MeToo movement rocked Hollywood starting in 2017, but it powerfully focuses on the lesser-known exploitation of actors from the LGBTQ+ community.
A fast-paced but sensitively told story set in the world of reality TV with an intriguing whodunit at its center.Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781637557372
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Subplot
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
High-concept and highly entertaining.
Fiction writers compete to finish a famous author’s abandoned novel.
Seven writers, all but one published, have received invitations to spend the weekend with crime novelist Arthur Fletch, the world’s most successful author, on his private island off the coast of Scotland. When they arrive at his cliffside castle, they expect to take part in one of the literary salons for which Fletch is famous; instead, they’re greeted by his agent, who informs them that Fletch is dead. Why has there been nothing about this in the press? Because “there are some…loose ends that must be tied up first.” Fletch has left his eagerly anticipated final novel unfinished, so the agent has summoned the writers to the island for a competition: One of them will get to complete Fletch’s book. As premises go, this one’s a humdinger, courtesy of fantasy writer V.E. Schwab and YA author Cat Clarke, here joining forces as Clarke. The story contains an amusing throughline about the indignity of being an uncelebrated novelist; as the agent tells the assembled writers, the contest winner will receive both cash and something equally valuable: “a way out of the midlist.” The novel’s wandering perspective allows each writer to vent their private frustrations, especially with the publishing industry and with the book world’s genre hierarchy (the YA writer among the competitors understands that she and the romance writer are “supposed to support each other against the general snobbishness of the other genres”). Readers who have come for the crimes and the twists, both of which are plentiful, might grow impatient with all the characters’ backstories, but these readers will likely warm to the shop talk, which at its funniest plays like a kvetchy midlist-writers’ support group.
High-concept and highly entertaining.Pub Date: April 7, 2026
ISBN: 9780063444614
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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