I picked this book up for the following reasons: The colours on the cover – hello neon! The title – what could a ‘safari murder party’ be? The use of ‘safari’ in the title. I am a Zimbabwean/South African and while I have been on plenty of game drives and visits to nature reserves, I’ve never considered any of that a ‘safari’ even though they’re marketed as safaris outside of my region. Fletcher is an … Continue reading Safari Murder Party by Rachel Moore →
While looking ahead at upcoming releases, I came across The Body in the Kitchen Garden, the sequel to The Potting Shed Murder. The sequel sounded intriguing and from time to time I’m quite partial to a cosy mystery and it has been a while since I read one. Why not see if I still enjoy them? So off to the library I went. Daphne, her husband, and her three children move to the English countryside … Continue reading The Potting Shed Murder by Paula Sutton →
Yesteryear was one of my most anticipated reads of 2026 so it’s such a bummer that it fell apart for me. I think this book had the opportunity to be a really interesting commentary on the Trad Wife movement and on White Christian womanhood, but it took a turn that felt frankly kind of lazy. Natalie Heller Mills is a very successful trad wife influencer. She lives on a farm with her husband and six … Continue reading Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke →
The Midnight Show is a ridiculously immersive and compelling celebrity mystery told through interview transcripts, email messages, texts, and articles as a Rolling Stone journalist and sketch comedy fan researches and compiles a history of a late-night program clearly based on SNL. The journalist, Madeline, interviews all the original surviving cast members, and is attempting to both investigate the history of the first seasons and establish a timeline for the central mystery: what happened to … Continue reading The Midnight Show by Lee Kelly and Jennifer Thorne →
CW: Self-harm (historical), violence, death of secondary characters. AJ reviewed the first book in the series, Slippery Creatures and enjoyed it and so did I. There is a simple reason for this being a review of the next two books together rather than one: when I finished The Sugared Game I was in agony, desperate for the rest of Will and Kim’s story in Subtle Blood. This is the second time I’ve read this trilogy. It … Continue reading The Sugared Game and Subtle Blood by KJ Charles →
Prairie Nightingale has formally opened her detective agency with the people who helped her solve her last case and the book begins with the four of them having a multilayered, multidirectional disagreement. Since each of them are unflinching, stubborn, sometimes prickly women, they get on each other’s nerves, even as Prairie reminds herself and them not to “flatten [someone] to the most annoying aspect of [their] personality.” Then a wealthy, iconoclastic woman walks in with … Continue reading Trailbreaker by Ruthie Knox and Annie Mare →
I had a tremendous amount of fun with this book. Not only is it actually laugh-out-loud funny, the heroine is perfection. Or to quote my Gen Z work colleague, she is goals. Slay. Let’s begin with the trauma that makes her who she is. Juliette Winters had two psychologists for parents who treated her more as a lab experiment than a beloved daughter. They published books about her! Multiple books! The result is that Juliette … Continue reading Cross Your Heart and Hope He Dies by Jenny Elder Moke →
This guest review comes from Lisa! A longtime romance aficionado and frequent commenter to SBTB, Lisa is a queer Latine critic with a sharp tongue and lots of opinions. She frequently reviews at All About Romance and Women Write About Comics, where she’s on staff, and you can catch her at @thatbouviergirl on Twitter. There, she shares good reviews, bracing industry opinions and thoughtful commentary when she’s not on her grind looking for the next … Continue reading Miss Caroline Bingley: Private Investigator by Kelly Gardiner and Sharmini Kumar →
I don’t enjoy reading women’s fiction and this book is women’s fiction, so please keep that in mind when you read this review. I shall do my best to correct for my preferences, but it’s best to be upfront about these things. So why on earth did I pick it up? Well, it was the premise you see. It totally sucked me in. I was so curious how this set up would unfold because this … Continue reading Welcome to Murder Week by Karen Dukess →
I love action movies with female leads. Turns out, women doing the killing and saving really works for me and this series scratches that itch. I know the Bitchery are probably sick of me climbing onto my high horse about blurbs, but I found this one misleading. I don’t think the person that wrote that blurb read the book carefully enough. The broad strokes are there, but the details aren’t right. Billie, Helen, Natalie and … Continue reading Kills Well With Others by Deanna Raybourn →
The Resurrectionist is an imperfect but entertaining gothic romantic thriller set in Edinburgh in 1828. A small but avid subset of Smart Bitches may recognize that the term ‘resurrectionist’, when used in Edinburgh in 1828, had a real-life sinister meaning. Yes, my gory gothic Bitches, this was the year that the real-life notorious William Burke and William Hare decided that committing murder and selling the corpses to anatomists was less trouble than digging up bodies. … Continue reading The Resurrectionist by A. Rae Dunlap →
