Hurricane Blonde - Halley Sutton - Top Book Pick!

Noir Fiction

Rating: 9/10

Hollywood loves a dead girl. Both on and off the screen.

Salma, progeny of the Hollywood elite, and a promising child actor, now spends her days as a guide for the Stars Six Feet Under tour, leading leering fans through star studded streets to the places where actresses of the past met their untimely, and often macabre, ends.

She has intimate knowledge of this club of dead girls, having lost her sister to murder decades before, one that was never solved. When she stumbles across a body in the exact spot her sister died, posed in an eerily similar fashion, she finds herself pulled back into her obsessive desperation to expose the murderer.

Soon she is immersed in the film adaptation of the book written about her sister and it’s downhill from there.

A dark and gripping noir that is both a scathing indictment of the cult of celebrity and a brutal unpacking of long kept secrets. So much more than a tragedy about a woman who met a grisly end, it’s also a profound exploration of grief and love.

I loved the depth and richness of this story, and the exquisite use of language was impressive.

Footnote: an unsettling quote included at the beginning of the book may have been inspiration for the title. “Blondes make the best victims. They’re like virgin snow that shows up the bloody footprints.” I am not going to share who said it but given its darkness it likely won’t be much of a surprise.

Book Pairing(s): These Women by Ivy Pochoda, Kismet by Amina Akhtar, Real Easy by Marie Rutkoski