3.25.

When I saw chick lit queen Jen Lancaster wrote a thriller, I had to read it! Ultimately it meandered a bit too much for me and I had to speed through to finish, as my interest started wandering through all the asides. I think it’d be perfect for fans of cozies!

Premise - the Friday Night Doom Crew are a group of true crime enthusiasts with very different backgrounds and personalities, who come together to crack cases and ensure justice is served.

When the FNDC realize one of their own, Diana, is a victim of sorts (her husband, Peter, is an online philanderer running a secret illegal pill mill), they decide to take the matter into their own hands. But Diana has her own secrets and the closer the FNDC get to hunting down Peter, the closer they get to exposing her.

The voice feels more women’s fiction than mystery/thriller (reasonable, given it’s a crossover). I think fans of cozy mysteries will find this is right in their wheelhouse, with the emphasis on quotidian concerns and the humorous ins and outs of relationships.

It was slow starting for me and I hoped for a little more narrative tension to push my read forward. This might have been a reading order thing for me - I came from Free Food for Millionaires to the Literati to Peter Pulaski Must Pay, and I think I was just ready for higher stakes at this point.

Lancaster definitely has a knack for humorous dialogue and her characters were charming, so by about 2/3 - 3/4 in I was really invested in the story, but that was just a little too late for me to give it more than a 3.

This also definitely felt like an ’00s read more than aughts vibes in the modern day… some things didn’t age too well, like the group’s slut shamey judgment of the other woman, picking about her looks rather than just focusing on the philanderer’s grossness.

I listened to the audio ARC, narrated by Tanya Eby, Anne Marie Lewis, Daniel Henning, Kelsey Jaffer, Tim Campbell. I’m not sure who read what, but Frankie’s narrator delivered a delightfully sassy read that really fit the tone of the book! The others were strong, too, but that was the standout for me.

Thanks, NetGalley and Brilliance Publishing, for the audio ARC in exchange for an honest review.