Hot Girl Murder Club by Ashley Winstead

I have a handful of authors where I will pretty much pick up whatever they write without needing to know much about it first, and Ashley Winstead has become one of those authors for me. I have really enjoyed her books in the past, so when Hot Girl Murder Club came onto my radar, I went into it with the kind of confidence that comes from already knowing an author is usually a good bet.

Unfortunately, this one just did not land for me.

The most telling part of my experience is that I can barely remember what happened in it now.

That is not the kind of thing I usually want to say about a mystery or thriller, because these are books that are supposed to stick with you. Even when I do not love a book, I can usually tell you exactly what annoyed me about it, what twist worked, what twist did not, or which character I wanted to throw out a window. With Hot Girl Murder Club, I finished it and was left with more of a vague feeling that I had read something that was supposed to be much more exciting than I found it.

The premise certainly had plenty of potential. You have a group of women, a murder, secrets, relationships, and enough questionable behavior to make you wonder who knows what and who might be hiding something. On paper, this is very much the kind of setup that should work for me. Give me a group of messy people, throw a murder into the middle of their lives, and let me spend several hundred pages trying to figure out who is lying.

Unfortunately, I never became invested enough in the characters or the mystery for that setup to really pull me along.

That is probably the biggest problem I had with the book. I kept reading, but I never reached the point where I felt like I needed to know what was going to happen next. There is a huge difference between reading a thriller because you are desperate to uncover the truth and reading one because you have already made it this far and might as well finish. Hot Girl Murder Club was much closer to the second experience for me.

I also found myself waiting for the story to give me that moment where everything clicks into place and I suddenly understand why all of these pieces were put together. Instead, I kept turning pages without developing that feeling of connection to the overall story.

And again, I really hate saying that because I genuinely like Ashley Winstead.

That probably made this disappointment worse than it would have been if the book had come from an author I was unfamiliar with. When you have an author who has become one of your go-to choices, there is a certain expectation that you are going to get something you enjoy. You start a new book already predisposed to like it, which makes it particularly frustrating when you realize you are simply not connecting with the story.

I do not think this means I am done with Ashley Winstead. Absolutely not.

One book that does not work for me is not enough to knock an author off my automatic-read list, particularly when I have enjoyed their other work. I will happily pick up whatever she writes next and hope that this was just a miss for me.

And maybe that is ultimately the fairest way to describe this one: it was a miss.

I know plenty of readers are going to have a completely different experience with it, and I would never tell someone not to read a book simply because it did not work for me. There are books I have absolutely loved that other people have hated, and vice versa. Reading is too subjective for me to treat my personal reaction as some kind of universal verdict.

For me, though, Hot Girl Murder Club was simply not memorable enough.

In fact, I am writing this review and realizing that I have very little to say about the actual plot because so much of it has already disappeared from my brain. That may be the most honest review I can give it. I did not hate it. I was not offended by it. I did not find it so terrible that I wanted to throw it across the room.

I just read it.

And then I moved on.

That is a particularly unfortunate fate for a thriller, because I want a mystery to give me something to obsess over, even if it is only one completely ridiculous twist that I cannot stop thinking about. I want characters I have opinions about, decisions I want to argue with, and a conclusion that makes me want to immediately text someone and say, “Okay, did you see that coming?”

I did not get that here.

So, if you are an Ashley Winstead fan, I would still say give it a try if the premise appeals to you. My experience with her other books is enough that I am absolutely willing to chalk this one up to personal preference rather than deciding that she has suddenly become an author I do not enjoy.

But for me, this was one of those books where the most memorable part of the reading experience was realizing how little of the book I remembered after I finished it.