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Book: “Hot Girl Murder Club” by Ashley Winstead
Publishing Info: Minotaur Books, July 2026
Where Did I Get This Book: I received an eARC from NetGalley
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: What’s a girl got to do to get some fame, a few million record sales, and justice for murder?
Ten years ago, aspiring singer-actress Scout Sage lost the only thing that mattered: her sister, Georgia. Ever since Georgia’s mysterious death at a Hollywood party, Scout’s done her best to honor her memory, clawing her way through the industry and collecting a network of climbers along the way, fellow hot girls in stilettos with cutthroat ambition, a new Hollywood order.
But when a slew of targeted murders makes headlines across LA, all pointing to Scout as the killer, she turns overnight from a mid-tier pop star into the world’s most famous (alleged) murderer. Now everything she’s worked to build—including the justice she wants for Georgia—will fall apart unless Scout can prove she’s not guilty.
Meanwhile, the young and unusual detective assigned to her case, herself no stranger to tragedy, begins to unearth secrets not even Scout knows, let alone her millions of new fans. Particularly about the ways Georgia’s death connects to an even older pattern of crimes long hushed over in Hollywood—an old reign of terror that, if brought to light, could be the fuel that ignites a reckoning the world over.
Review: Thank you to NetGalley for sending me an eARC of this novel!
One would think that a book that has a premise in which a Taylor Swift-esque pop sensation is leading a group of women vigilantes against scummy men in Hollywood would be one hundred percent my jam. I mean, on paper it absolutely is! And given that I have enjoyed books by soapy thriller author Ashley Winstead in the past, when I read the description of “Hot Girl Murder Club”, her newest book, I was pretty damn eager to get my hands on it. So it’s really too bad that I didn’t particularly like it.
There was just so much going on in this book. I understand wanting to have an intricate thriller that has a lot of working parts that seem separate, and then how satisfying it is for both author AND reader for those parts to finally come together in a mind blowing way. But this book never had that kind of pay off, because there were SO MANY parts that it was hard to keep track of all of it. I don’t deny that with a thriller like this with a huge web of lies, abuse, privilege, and greed at its heart that you probably want a large scope, especially since we all know by now that Hollywood DOES have a lot of festering corruption that leads to vulnerable women getting hurt and it’s very entwined. But the problem is that all of it in this book is confusing and feels pretty shallow even when it all does come together. Surprise, this person is actually THIS person, and THIS person has THIS motive that has been hidden that has a connection to this OTHER person. It made my head spin and I found myself continuously having to try and recalibrate to figure out who was doing what. I already have a difficult time dealing with a book that has a whole lot of twists and turns just for the shock of it, and when they feel like they are not only unearned but also half baked it’s that much more frustrating to read. Sure, it all did mostly come together by the end, but I didn’t really buy it.
And because of all of these perspectives and connections and players, MANY of our characters didn’t get the amount of page time that they deserved, and that in turn led them all to feel underdeveloped and two dimensional. I love the idea of a vigilante Taylor Swift or Ariana Grande as much as the next person, but Scout was pretty darn boring. It’s true that we never really got fully into her head as she didn’t have perspective chapters (and that’s no doubt by design), but with multiple people having lots of thoughts about her I had hoped we would get a little bit more than we did. Even characters like Isabel, Scout’s assistant/best friend/enabler, who WERE interesting suffered a bit because while I understood her motivation the most, she still had to cede the floor to lots of other characters that weren’t as interesting. Too many players.
“Hot Girl Murder Club” was disappointing. I had high hopes, but sadly they were not met.
Rating 5: There was just too much going on, and while it mostly did come together, the character development suffered quite a bit.
Reader’s Advisory:
“Hot Girl Murder Club” is included on the Goodreads list “Popsugar 2026 #37: A Book About a Pop Star”.
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