Book Review: Hot Girl Murder Club by Ashley Winstead

Solid Enough Vigilante Thriller Absolutely *DRIPPING* Misandry. If you like girl power thrillers where every man who doesn't kowtow to the female leads' every whim is characterized as at *best* someone to be ignored and not considered at all - with most considered to be outright predatory - well, Winstead has crafted a tale here that will be absolutely up your alley.

To be crystal clear, as a vigilante thriller *outside* of the blatant and extensive bigotry, this really is a fun and compelling tale. Which is why it only gets the single star for such blatant and pervasive bigotry, rather than a more severe deduction that would have been warranted for a lesser yet equally bigoted work.

Yes, there are a lot of characters and yes, as with most thrillers of this type with so many characters, it can be tough at first to distinguish who is doing what when and who we're following at any given moment, but this does get better as the story progresses, and it really does serve the overall story quite well to be told in this exact manner.

What would have served the story even more would be to tell it without such blatant and pervasive bigotry, and thus one assumes that such bigotry was both intentional and well regarded by Winstead and all of the other hands that had to work on this book to get it published via a Big 5 publisher (St. Martin's Press, in this case).

Maybe this bigotry helps sell the tale. Maybe it hurts it. One suspects it would have been much more timely a decade ago during the height of MeToo, where much of this tale revolves around middle school revenge fantasies of much of the high profile accusations of that era in the real world, with many of the revenge plots herein being not even that well disguised versions of many of the more infamous cases.

Still, for those who want this exact kind of girlboss vigilante revenge tale... hey, this one is going to be *perfect* for you. Seriously.

Recommended. For at least some readers.

This review of Hot Girl Murder Club by Ashley Winstead was originally written on July 17, 2026.