I received an advance copy of this book courtesy of the publisher. All thoughts are my own.

This is a book I grabbed entirely because of the title, which, honestly, feels very on brand for me. I went in excited and curious, and for a good chunk of the book, I was absolutely locked in. I liked it overall. I just really wanted to love it. What started out with strong feelings ended up a little complicated. I think this book is going to be very polarizing with lots of people either loving or hating it.

The opening is sharp, intense, and immediately gripping. The first act is told entirely from the main character’s point of view through a series of emails sent to “Justice Bimbo,” the host of a wildly popular feminist investigative podcast. Our narrator, who has dubbed herself Murder Bimbo, claims responsibility for killing Meat Neck, a far-right political figure running for president. She wants her story told. On her terms. One email at a time.

This section works extremely well. The voice is confident, abrasive, funny, and unsettling. Murder Bimbo is hyper-articulate and deeply unreliable, and the structure makes that unreliability even more compelling. She lays out how she was recruited, trained, and used by a shadowy group of code-named agents, and while the story is outlandish, it’s told with such conviction that you’re never quite sure how much to believe. I was fully invested and genuinely impressed by how strong and distinctive the voice was.
Then the second act hits, and things get even more interesting.

The format shifts to a new string of emails, this time addressed to her ex-girlfriend. Someone she is very clearly still in love with. Here, the story changes. The details overlap, but the motivations, emotional beats, and framing are wildly different. This version feels more vulnerable, more personal, and far messier. Instead of pulling me out of the story, this shift deepened my engagement. It made the narrator even more unreliable, and I loved sitting in that uncertainty. Who is she really telling the truth to, if anyone? And why?

For me, this middle section was where the book really shined. The contradictions felt intentional and smart. I was constantly recalibrating what I thought I knew, which is exactly what I want from an unreliable narrator. At this point, I was fully in “I love this” territory.

Unfortunately, the third and final act is where the book fizzled out for me.

Once we arrive at what’s framed as the “real story,” the tension deflates. By that point, my shock meter felt completely depleted. After two acts built on distortion, performance, and contradiction, the final reveals didn’t land with the impact I was hoping for. Nothing truly surprised me anymore, and the answers felt flatter than the questions. I kept waiting for one last gut punch, especially in the epilogue, something that would recontextualize everything or pull the rug out from under me again. It never quite came.

That disappointment doesn’t erase what the book does well. The structure is inventive. The voice is bold. The political satire is sharp. Murder Bimbo herself is an unforgettable character. But the ending felt like it chose explanation over escalation, and for a book that thrives on chaos and instability, that choice dulled the edge.

In the end, I liked the book, I just didn’t love it the way I thought I would based on how strong the first two acts were. It’s one of those books that starts at a ten, stays there for a while, and then quietly slips down a few notches instead of going out with a bang.

That said, if you enjoy experimental formats, unreliable narrators, political satire, and bold narrative voices, this is still very much worth reading. Even with its fizzle at the end, the book takes risks, and I’ll always respect a book that swings hard, even if it doesn’t fully stick the landing.